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CjOEDOUCHT DEPOSm 



THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY 

EDITED BY J. L. 5PINGARN 



\LII5RARY/ 



.^ 



THE REFORM OF 
EDUCATION 

BY 

GIOVANNI GENTILE 



AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY 

DINO BIGONGIARI 

With an Introduction by 
BENLDLTTO CROCL 




NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
1922 






COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 



PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY 

RAHWAV, N. .< 



AUG IS 1922 

0)CI.A677901 



CONTENTS 

PACK 

Introduction vii 

CHAPTER 

I Education and Nationality .... 3 
II Education and Personality . . . . 18 

III The Fundamental Antinomy of Education 40 

IV Realism and Idealism in the Concept of 

Culture 63 

V The Spirituality of Culture . . . 85 

VI The Attributes of Culture . . . .110 

VII The Bias of Realism 139 

VIII The Unity of Education . . . .166 

IX Character and Physical Education . .192 

X The Ideal of Education 219 

XI Conclusion 246 



NOTE 

Shortly after Trieste fell into Italian hands, a series of 
lectures was arranged for the school teachers of the city, in 
order to welcome them to their new duties as citizens and 
officials of Italy. The task of opening the series was assigned 
to Giovanni Gentile, Professor of Philosophy in the Uni- 
versity of Rome, who delivered the lectures which constitute 
the present volume. At my request Signor Gentile has re- 
written the first chapter, eliminating some of the more local 
of the allusions which the nature of the original occasion 
called forth, and Senatore Croce has very generously contrib- 
uted his illuminating Introduction. The volume as it stands 
is more than a treatise on education: it is at one and the 
same time an introduction to the thought of one of the 
greatest of living philosophers, and an introduction to the 
study of all philosophy. If the teachers of Trieste were able 
to understand and to enjoy a philosophic discussion of their 
chosen work, why should not the teachers of America? 

J. E. S. 



INTRODUCTION 

The author of this book has been working in the 
same field with me for over a quarter of a century, ever 
since the time when we undertook — he a very young 
man, and I somewhat his senior — to shake Italy out 
of the doze of naturalism and positivism back to ideal- 
istic philosophy; or, as it would be better to say, to 
philosophy pure and simple, if indeed philosophy is 
always idealism. 

Together we founded a review, the Critica, and kept 
it going by our contributions; together we edited col- 
lections of classical authors; and together we engaged 
in many lively controversies. And it seems indeed as 
though we really succeeded in laying hold of and again 
firmly re-establishing in Italy the tradition of philo- 
sophical studies, thus welding a chain which evidently 
has withstood the strain and destructive fury of the 
war and its afterclaps. 

By this I do not mean to imply that our gradual 
achievements were the result of a definite preconcerted 
plan. Our work was the spontaneous consequence of 
our spontaneous mental development and of the spon- 
taneous agreement of our minds. And therefore this 
common task, too, gradually becoming differentiated 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

in accordance with the peculiarities of our tempera- 
ments, our tendencies, and our attitudes, resulted 
in a kind of division of labour between us. So that 
whereas I by preference have devoted my attention 
to the history of literature, Gentile has dedicated him- 
self more particularly to the history of philosophy and 
especially of Italian philosophy, not only as a thinker 
but as a scholar too, and as a philologist. He may be 
said to have covered the entire field from the Middle 
Ages to the present time by his works on Scholasticism 
in Italy, on Bruno, on Telesio, on Renaissance philos- 
ophy, on Neapolitan philosophy from Genovesi to Gal- 
luppi, on Rosmini, on Gioberti, and on the philosophical 
writers from 1850 to 1900. And though his com- 
prehensive History of Italian Philosophy, published in 
parts, is far from being finished, the several sections 
of it have been elaborated and cast in the various mon- 
ographs which I have just mentioned. 

In addition to this. Gentile has been devoting special 
attention to religious problems. He took a very im- 
portant part in the inquiry into and criticism of "mod- 
ernism," the hybrid nature of which he laid bare, 
exposing both the inner contradictions and the scanty 
sincerity of the movement. His handling of this ques- 
tion was shown to be effective by the fact, among 
others, that the authors of the encyclical Pascendi, 
which brought upon Modernism the condemnation of 
the Church, availed themselves of the sharp edge of 



INTRODUCTION ix 

Gentile's logical arguments, prompted by scientific 
loyalty and dictated by moral righteousness. 

Finally, and in a more close connection with the 
present work, it will be remembered that Gentile has 
done away with the chaotic pedagogy of the positiv- 
istic school, and has also definitely criticised the edu- 
cational theory of Herbart. As far back as 1900 
he published a monograph of capital importance, in 
which he showed that pedagogy in so far as it is 
philosophical resolves itself without residuum into the 
philosophy of the spirit; for the science of the spirit's 
education can not but be the science of the spirit's 
development, — of its dialectics, of its necessity. 

Indeed, we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy 
has attained in the present day a simplicity and a depth 
of concepts unknown elsewhere. In Italy, not educa- 
tional science alone, but the practice of it and its 
political aspects have been thoroughly recast and amply 
developed. And this, too, is due pre-eminently to the 
work of Gentile. His authority therefore is power- 
fully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived in- 
tensely the life of the school and loves it dearly. 

In addition to these differences arising from our 
division oi labour, others may of course be noticed, 
and they are to be found in the form that philosophical 
doctrines have taken on in each of us. Identity is 
impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is 
closely bound up with the personahty of the thinker, 



X INTRODUCTION 

with his spiritual interests, and with his experiences of 
life. There is never true identity except in the so- 
called ''philosophical school," which indicates the death 
of a philosophy, in the same way that the poetical 
school proclaims death in poetry. 

And so it has come about that our general conception 
of philosophy as simple philosophy of the spirit — of 
the subject, and never of nature, or of the object — has 
developed a peculiar stress in Gentile, for whom philos- 
ophy is above all that point in which every abstraction 
is overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the 
act of Thought; whereas for me philosophy is essen- 
tially methodology of the one real and concrete Think- 
ing — of historical Thinking. So that while he strongly 
emphasises unity, I no less energetically insist on the 
distinction and dialectics of the forms of the spirit as 
a necessary formation of the methodology of historical 
judgment. But of this enough, especially since the 
reader can only become interested in these differences 
after he has acquired a more advanced knowledge of 
contemporary Italian philosophy. 

I am convinced that the translation and popularisa- 
tion of Gentile's work will contribute to the toilsome 
formation of that consciousness, of that system of 
convictions, of that moral and mental faith which is 
the profound need of our times. For our age, eager 
and anxious for Faith, is perhaps not yet completely 
resigned to look for tlie new creed of humanity there 



INTRODUCTION xi 

where alone it may be found, where by firm resolve it 
may be secured — in pure Thought. Clear-sighted ob- 
servers have perhaps not failed to notice that the World 
War, in addition to every thing else, has been a strife 
of religions, a clash of conflicting conceptions of life, 
a struggle of opposed philosophies. It is surely not 
the duty of thinkers to settle economic and political 
contentions by ineffective appeals to the universal 
brotherhood of man; but it is rather their duty to com- 
pose mental differences and antagonisms, and thus 
form the new faith of humanity — a new Christianity 
or a new Humanism, as we may wish to call it. Such 
a faith will certainly not be spared the conflicts from 
which ancient Christianity itself was not free; but it 
may reasonably be hoped that it will rescue us from 
intellectual anarchy, from unbridled individualism, 
from sensualism, from scepticism, from pessimism, from 
every aberration which for a century and a half has 
been harassing the soul of man and the society of man- 
kind under the name of Romanticism. 

Benedetto Croce. 
Rome, April, 1921. 



THE REFORM OF EDUCATION 



CHAPTER I 

EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 

Participation on the part of elementary school teach- 
ers in the work and studies of the Universities has 
always seemed to me to constitute a real need of culture 
and of primary education. For the elementary school, 
by the very nature of the professional training of its 
teachers, is exposed to a grave danger from which it 
must be rescued if we mean to keep it alive. 

The training of the elementary school teacher tends 
to be dogmatic. True it is that vigilant individuality 
and passionate love for his exquisitely spiritual calling 
impel the school teacher to an untiring criticism of his 
methods, of his actual teaching, and of the life of the 
school which he directs and promotes. But neverthe- 
less in consequence of those very studies by which he 
has prepared himself to be an elementary instructor, 
he is led to look upon that learning which constitutes 
his mental equipment and the foundation of all his 
future teaching, as something quite finished, rounded 
out, enclosed in definite formulas, rules, and laws, all 
of which have been ascertained once for all and are no 
longer susceptible of ulterior revision. He looks upon 
this learning not as a developing organism, but as 

3 



4 EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 

something definitely moulded and stereotyped. From 
this the conclusion is drawn that a certain kind of 
knowledge may serve as a corner stone for the whole 
school edifice. Since his discipline and his teaching 
consist mainly of elements which because of their ab- 
stractness miss the renovating flow of spiritual life, the 
teacher slowly but surely ends by shutting himself up 
in a certain number of ideas, which are final as far 
as he is concerned. They are never corrected or trans- 
formed; in their mechanical fixity they cease to live; 
and the mind which cherishes and preserves them loses 
its natural tendency to doubt. Yet what is doubt but 
dissatisfaction with what is known and with the manner 
of knowing, and a spur to further inquiry, to better and 
fuller learning, to self scrutiny, to an examination of 
one's own sentiments, one's own character, and an 
inducement to broadmindedness, to a welcoming re- 
ceptiveness of all the suggestions and all the teachings 
which life at all moments generously showers on us? 

The remedy against this natural tendency of the 
teacher's mind is to be found in the University, where 
in theory, and so far as is possible, in practice too, 
science is presented not as ready-made, definitely 
turned out in final theories, enclosed in consecrated 
manuals; but as inquiry, as research, as spiritual activ- 
ity which does not rest satisfied with its accom- 
plishments, but for ever feels that it does not 
yet know or does not know enough, aware of the 



EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 5 

difficulties which threaten every attained position, 
and ready unrestingly to track them, to reveal 
them, and meet them squarely. This life, which 
is perpetual criticism, and unceasing progress in 
a learning which is never completed, which never 
aspires to be complete, is the serious and fruitful pur- 
pose of the University. Here we must come, to restore 
freshness to our spiritual activities, which alone 
give value to knowledge, and wrest it from deadening 
crystallisation, from mechanical rigidity. For tliis 
reason, it seems to me, special provision should be 
made in the University to satisfy the needs of school 
teachers. It is not a question of merely furnishing 
them with additional information which they might 
just as well get out of books. The University must 
act on their minds, shake them, start them going, instil 
in them salutary doubt by criticism, and develop a 
taste for true knowledge. 

The following chapters contain a series of University 
lectures, in accordance with these criteria, and deliv- 
ered originally to the elementary teachers of Trieste, 
now for the first time again an Italian city. They con- 
stitute a course which aims not to increase the quantity 
of culture, but to change its character. It is an attempt 
to introduce the elementary teacher into those spiritual 
workshops which are the halls of a University, to induce 
him to take part in the original investigations which 
constantly contribute to the formation of our national 



6 EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 

learning; which forever make and reshape our ideas 
and our convictions as to what we should want Italian 
science to be, the Italian concepts of life and literature; 
as to what constitute the heirloom of our school, that 
sacred possession bequeathed to us by our forefathers 
which makes us what we are, which gives us a name 
and endows us with a personality, by which we are 
enabled to look forward to a future of Italy which is 
not solely economic and political, but moral and intel- 
lectual as well. 

And thus, because of the time, the place, the audi- 
ence, and the subject, we are from the start brought 
face to face with a serious question, — a question which 
has often been debated, and which in the last few 
years, on account of the exasperation of national senti- 
ment brought about by the World War, has become the 
object of passionate controversies. For if it has been 
frequently argued on one side that science is by nature 
and ought to be national, there has been no lack of 
warning from the other side as to the dangers of this 
position. For war, it was said, would, sooner or later, 
come to an end and be a thing of the past, whereas 
truth never sets, never becomes a thing of the past; 
it is error alone that is destined to pass and disappear. 
We were reminded of the fact that what is scientifically 
true and artistically beautiful is beautiful and true 
beyond no less than within the national frontier; and 
that only on this condition is it worthy of its name. 



EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 7 

This question therefore presents itself as a preliminary 
to our investigation, and it is for us to examine it. 
We shall do so in as brief a manner as the subject will 
allow. 

We shall first point out the inutility of distinguishing 
science from culture, education from instruction. 
Those who insist on these distinctions maintain that 
though a school is never national in virtue of the con- 
tent of its scientific teaching, it must nevertheless be 
national in that it transforms science into culture, 
makes it over into an instrument with which to shape 
consciousness and conscience, and uses it as a tool for 
the making of men and for the training of citizens. 
Thus we have as an integral part of science a form of 
action directed on the character and the will of the 
young generations that are being nurtured and raised 
in accordance with national traditions and in view of 
the ends which the state wants to attain. Such dis- 
tinctions however complicate but do not resolve the 
controversy. They entangle it with other questions 
which it were better to leave untouched at this juncture. 
For it might be said of questions what Manzoni said 
of books: one at a time is enough — if it isn't too much. 

We shall therefore try to simplify matters, and begin 
by clarifying the two concepts of nationality and of 
knowledge, in order to define the concept of the "na- 
tionality of knowledge." What, then, is the nation? 
A very intricate question, indeed, over which violent 



8 EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 

discussions are raging, and all the more passionately 
because the premises and conclusions of this contro- 
versy are never maintained in the peaceful seclusion 
of abstract speculative theories, but are dragged at 
every moment in the very midst of the concrete inter- 
ests of the men themselves who affirm or deny the value 
of nationalities. So that serious difficulties are en- 
countered every time an attempt is made to determine 
the specific and concrete content of this concept of the 
nation, which is ever present, and yet ever elusive. 
Proteus-like, it appears before us, but as we try to 
grasp it, it changes semblance and breaks away. It 
is visible to the immediate intuition of every national 
consciousness, but it slips from thought as we strive 
to fix its essence. 

Is it common territory that constitutes nationality? 
or is it common language? or political life led in com- 
mon? or the accumulation of memories, of traditions, 
and of customs by which a people looks back to one 
past where it never fails to find itself? Or is it per- 
haps the relationship which binds together all the indi- 
viduals of a community into a strong and compact 
structure, assigning a mission and an apostolate to a 
people's faith? One or the other of these elements, or 
all of them together, have in turn been proposed and 
rejected with equally strong arguments. For in each 
case it may be true or it may be false that the given 
element constitutes the essence of a people's national- 



EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 9 

ity, or of any historical association whatsoever. All 
these elements, whether separately or jointly, may have 
two different meanings, one of which makes them a 
mere accidental content of the national consciousness, 
whereas the other establishes them as necessary, essen- 
tial, and unfailing constituents. For they may have 
a merely natural value, or they may have a moral and 
spiritual one. Our birth-land, which nourished us in 
our infancy, and now shelters the bodies of our parents, 
the mountains and the shores that surround it and in- 
dividualise it, these are natural entities. They are not 
man-made; we cannot claim them, nor can we fasten 
our existence to them. Even our speech, our religion 
itself, which do indeed live in the human mind, may 
yet be considered as natural facts similar to the geo- 
graphical accidents which give boundaries and elevation 
to the land of a people. We may, abstractly, look 
upon our language as that one which was spoken 
before we were born, by our departed ancestors who 
somehow produced this spiritual patrimony of which 
we now have the use and enjoyment, very much in the 
sam^ way that we enjoy the sunlight showered upon us 
by nature. In this same way a few, perhaps many, 
conceive of religion: they look upon it as something 
bequeathed and inherited, and not therefore as the 
fruit of our own untiring faith and the correlate of our 
actual personality. All these elements in so far as 
they are natural are evidently extraneous to our per- 



10 EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 

sonality. We do dwell within this peninsula cloistered 
by the Alps; we delight in this luminous sky, in our 
charming shores smiled upon by the waters of the 
Mediterranean. But if we emigrate from this lovely 
abode, if under the stress of economic motives we 
traverse the ocean and gather, a number of us, some- 
where across the Atlantic; and there, united by the 
natural tie of common origin, and fastened by the 
identity of speech, we maintain ourselves as a special 
community, with common interests and peculiar moral 
affinities, then, in spite of the severance from our native 
peninsula, we have preserved our nationality: Italy has 
crossed the ocean in our wake. Not only can we 
sunder ourselves from our land, but we may even 
relinquish our customs, forget our language, abandon 
our religion; or we may, within our own fatherland, be 
kept separate by peculiar historical traditions, by dif- 
ferences of dialects or even of language, by religion, 
by clashing interests, and yet respond with the same 
sentiment and the same soul to the sound of one Name, 
to the colours of one flag, to the summons of common 
hopes, to the alarm of common dangers. 

And it is then that we feel ourselves to be a people; 
then are we a nation. It is not what we put within 
this concept that gives consistency and reality to the 
concept itself; it is the act of spiritual energy whereby 
we cling to a certain element or elements in the con- 
sciousness of that collective personality to which we 



EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY ii 

feel we belong. Nationality consists not in content 
which may vary, but in the form which a certain con- 
tent of human consciousness assumes when it is felt to 
constitute a nation's character. 

But this truth is still far from being recognised. Its 
existence is not even suspected by those who utilise a 
materially constituted nationality as a title, that is, an 
antecedent, and a support for political rights claimed 
by more or less considerable ethnical aggregates that 
are more or less developed and more or less prepared to 
take on the form of free and independent states and to 
secure recognition of a de facto political personality on 
the strength of an assumed de jure existence. 

This truth, however, was grasped by the profound 
intuition of Mazzini, the apostle of nationalities, the 
man who roused our national energies, and whose irre- 
sistible call awakened Italy and powerfully impelled 
her to affirm her national being. Even from the first 
years of the Giovine Italia he insisted that Italy, when 
still merely an idea, prior to her taking on a concrete 
and actual political reality, was not a people and was 
not a nation. For a nation, he maintained, is not 
something existing in nature, but a great spiritual real- 
ity. Therefore like all that is in and for the spirit, 
it is never a fact ready to be ascertained, but always 
a mission, a purpose, something that has to be realised 
— an action. 

The Italians to whom ^lazzini spoke were not the 



12 EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 

people around him. He was addressing that future 
people which the Italians themselves had to create. 
And they would create it by fixing their souls on one 
idea — the idea of a fatherland to be conquered — a 
sacred idea, so noble that people would live and die 
for it, as for that sovereign and ultimate Good for 
which all sacrifices are gladly borne, without which 
man can not live, outside of which he finds nothing 
that satisfies him, nothing that is conducive to a life's 
work. For Mazzini nationality is not inherited 
wealth, but it is ' man's own conquest. A people 
can not faint-heartedly claim from others recognition 
of their nation, but must themselves demonstrate its 
existence, realise it by their willingness to fight and 
die for its independence: independence which is 
freedom and unity and constitutes the nation. It is 
not true that first comes the nation and then follows 
the state; the nation is the state when it has triumphed 
over the enemy, and has overcome the oppression, 
which till then were hindering its formation. It is 
not therefore a vague aspiration or a faint wish, but 
an active faith, an energetic volition which creates, 
in the freed political Power, the reality of its 
own moral personality and of its collective conscious- 
ness. Hence the lofty aim of Mazzini in insisting that 
Italy should not be made with the help of foreigners 
but should be a product of the revolution, that is, of 
its own will. 



EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 13 

And truly tlie nation is, substantially, as Mazzini 
saw and firmly believed, the common will of a people 
which affirms itself and thus secures self-realisation. 
A nation is a nation only when it wills to be one. I said, 
when it really wills, not when it merely says it does. 
It must therefore act in such a manner as to realise 
its own personality in the form of the State beyond 
which there is no collective will, no common person- 
ality of the people. And it must act seriously, sacri- 
ficing the individual to the collective whole, and wel- 
coming martyrdom, which in every case is but the 
sacrifice of the individual to the universal, the lavishing 
of our own self to the ideal for which we toil. 

From this we are not, however, to infer that a nation 
can under no circumstances exist prior to the forma- 
tion of its State. For if this formation means the 
formal proclamation or the recognition by other States, 
it surely does pre-exist. But it does not if we con- 
sider that the proclamation of sovereignty is a moment 
in a previously initiated process, and the effect of pre- 
existing forces already at work; which effect is never 
definite because a State, even after it has been consti- 
tuted, continues to develop in virtue of those very 
forces which produced it; so that it is constantly re- 
newing and continually reconstituting itself. Hence 
a State is always a future. It is that state which this 
very day we must set up, or rather at this very instant, 
and with all our future efforts bent to that political 



14 EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 

ideal which gleams before us, not only in the light of 
a beautiful thought, but as the irresistible need of our 
own personality. 

The nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and 
native to our own being as the State, considered as 
Universal Will, is one with our concrete and actual 
ethical personality. Italy for us is the fatherland 
which lives in our souls as that complex and lofty 
moral idea which we are realising. We realise it in 
every instant of our lives, by our feelings, and by our 
thoughts, by our speech and by our imagination, indeed, 
by our whole life which concretely flows into that Will 
which is the State and which thus makes itself felt in 
the world. And this Will, this State is Italy, which 
has fought and won; which has struggled for a long 
time amid errors and sorrows, hopes and dejection, 
manifestations of strength and confessions of weak- 
ness, but always with a secret thought, with a deep- 
seated aspiration which sustained her throughout her 
entire ordeal, now exalting her in the flush of action, 
now, in the critical moment of resistance, confirming 
and fortifying her by the undying faith in ultimate 
triumph. This nation, which we all wish to raise to an 
ever loftier station of honour and of beauty, even 
though we differ as to the means of attaining this end, 
is it not the substance of our personality, — of that 
personality which we possess not as individuals who 
drift with the current, but as men who have a power- 



EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 15 

ful self-consciousness and who look upward for their 
destiny? 

If we thus understand the nation, it follows that not 
only every man must bear the imprint of his nationality, 
but that also there is no true science, no man's science, 
which is not national. The ancients believed, in con- 
formity with the teachings of the Greeks, that science 
soars outside of the human life, above the vicissitudes 
of mortals, beyond the current of history, which is 
troubled by the fatal conflicts of error, by falterings 
and doubts, and by the unsatisfied thirst for knowledge. 
Truth, lofty, pure, motionless, and unchangeable, was 
to them the fixed goal toward which the human mind 
moved, but completely severed from it and trans- 
cendent. This concept, after two thousand years of 
speculation, was to reveal itself as abstract and there- 
fore fallacious, — abstract from the human mind, 
which at every given instance mirrors itself in such an 
image of truth, ever gazing upon an eternal ideal but 
always intent on reshaping it in a new and more ade- 
quate form. The modern world, at first with dim con- 
sciousness, and guided rather by a fortunate intuition 
than by a clear concept of its own real orientation, 
then with an ever clearer, ever more critical conviction, 
has elaborated a concept which is directly antithetical 
to the classical idea of a celestial truth removed from 
the turmoil of earthly things. It has accordingly and 
by many ways reached the conclusion that reality, lofty 



i6 EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 

though it be, and truth itself, which nourishes the mind 
and alone gives validity to human thought, are in life 
itself, in the development of the mind, in the growth 
of the human personality, and that this personality, 
though ideally beyond our grasp, is yet in the concrete 
always historical and actual, and realises itself in its 
immanent value. It therefore creates its truth and 
its world. Modern philosophy and modern conscious- 
ness no longer point to values which, transcending 
history, determine its movement and its direction 
by external finalities: they show to man that the 
lofty aim which is his law is within himself; that it is 
in his ever unsatisfied personality as it unceasingly 
strains upward towards its own ideal. 

Science is no longer conceived to-day as the indiffer- 
ent pure matter of the intellect. It is an interest which 
invests the entire person, extols it and with it moves on- 
ward in the eternal rhythm of an infinite development. 
Science is not for us the abstract contemplation of 
yore; it is self-consciousness that man acquires, and 
by means of which he actuates his own humanity. 
And therefore science is no longer an adornment or an 
equipment of the mind, considered as diverse to its 
content; it is culture, and the formation of this very 
mind. So that whenever science is as yet so abstract 
that it seems not to touch the person and fails to form 
it or transform it, it is an indication that it is not as 
yet true science. 



EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 17 

So we conclude thus : he who distinguishes his person 
from his knowledge is ignorant of the nature of knowl- 
edge. The modern teacher knows of no science which 
is not an act of a personality. It knows no personality 
which admits of being sequestered from its ideas, from 
its ways of thinking and of feeling, from that greater 
life which is the nation. Concrete personality then is 
nationality, and therefore neither the school nor science 
possesses a learning which is not national. 

And for this reason therefore our educational re- 
forms which are inspired by the teachings of modern 
idealistic philosophy demand that the school be ani- 
mated and vivified by the spiritual breath of the 
fatherland. 



CHAPTER II 

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

It is essential at the very outset to understand clearly 
what is meant by concrete personality, and why the 
particular or empirical personality, as we are usually 
accustomed to consider it, is nothing more than an 
abstraction. 

Ordinarily, relying on the most obvious data of ex- 
perience, we are led to believe that the sphere of our 
moral personality coincides exactly with the sphere of 
our physical person, and is therefore limited and con- 
tained by the surface of our material body. We con- 
sider this body in itself as an indivisible whole, with 
such reciprocal correspondence and interdependence of 
its parts as to become a veritable system. It seems to 
us also that this system moves in space as a whole 
when the body is displaced, continuing to remain united 
as long as it exists. We look upon it as though it 
were separated from all other bodies, whether of the 
same or of different kinds, in such a manner that it 
excludes others from the place it occupies, and is itself 
in turn excluded by them. One body then, one physi- 
cal person, one moral personality — that moral person- 
ality which each one of us recognises and affirms by 

the consciousness of the ego. 

18 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 19 

And in fact when I walk I am not a different person 
from when I think. My ego remains the same whether 
my body moves through space or whether my mind 
inwardly meditates. Impenetrability, which is pos- 
sessed by matter, seems to be also a property of human 
individualism. 

From my ego every other ego is apparently excluded. 
What I am no one else can be, and I in turn cannot be 
confused with another person. Those of my fellow 
beings that are most intimately, most closely related 
to me seem yet as completely external to me, as thor- 
oughly sundered from my spirit, as their bodies are 
from mine. My father, my brother are dead. They 
have vanished from this world in which I nevertheless 
continue to exist; just as a stone remains in its place 
and is in no way affected when another stone near by 
is removed; or as a mutilated pedestal may still remain 
to remind the onlooker of the statue that was torn 
away. 

Hundreds of individuals assemble to listen to the 
words of an orator. But no necessary ties exist be- 
tween the various persons; and when the speaking is 
over, each one goes his way confident that he has lost 
no part of himself and that he has maintained his in- 
dividuality absolutely unaltered. 

Our elders lived on this planet when we had not yet 
arrived. After we came, they gradually withdrew, one 
after the other. And just as they had been able to 



20 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

exist without us, so shall we continue to live without 
them, and away from them develop our personality. 
For each one of us, according to this point of view, 
has his own being within himself, his own particular 
destiny. Every man makes of himself the centre 
of his world, of that universe which he has created with 
deeds and thoughts: a universe of ideas, of images, 
of concepts, of systems, which are all in his brain; 
a universe of values, of desirable goods and of 
abhorred evils, all of which are rooted in his own 
individual will, in his character, and originate from the 
peculiar manner in which he personally colours this 
world and conceives the universe. 

What is another man's sorrow to me? Wliat part 
have I in his joys? And how can the science of Aris- 
totle or of Galileo be anything to me, since I do not 
know them, since I cannot read their books, and am 
totally unfamiliar with their teachings? And the un- 
known wayfarer who passes by, wrapped in his 
thoughts, what does he care for my loftiest concep- 
tions, for the songs that well forth from the depths of 
my soul? The hero's exploit brings no glory to us; 
the heinous deed of the criminal makes us shudder in- 
deed, but drives no pangs of remorse through our 
conscience. For every one of us has his own body 
and his own particular soul. Every one, in short, is 
himself independently of what others may be. 

This conception, which we ordinarily form of our 



EDUCATION AND PERSONAXITY 21 

personality, and on which we erect the system of our 
practical life in all our manifold relations with other 
individuals, is an abstract concept. For when we 
thus conceive our being, we see but a single side of it 
and that the least important: we fail to grasp that part 
which reveals all that is spiritual, and human, and 
truly and peculiarly ours. I shall not here investigate 
how the human personality has two aspects so totally 
different one from the other ; and in what remote depths 
we must search for the common root of these two 
contrasting and apparently contradictory manifesta- 
tions. Our task for the moment is to establish within 
ourselves through reflection the firm conviction that 
we are not lone individualities: that there is another 
and a better part of us, an element which is the very 
antithesis of the particular, that one, namely, which 
is the deep-seated source of our nature, by which we 
cease, each one of us, to be in irreducible opposition 
to the rest of humanity, and become instead what all 
the others are or what we want them to be. 

In order to fix our attention on this more profound 
aspect of our inner life, I shall take as an example 
one of those elements which are contained in the con- 
cept of nationality. Language. Language it must be 
remembered does not belong per se to nationality; it 
belongs to it in virtue of an act by which a will, a per- 
sonality, affirms itself with a determined content. We 
must now point out the abstract character of that 



22 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

concept by which language, which is a constituent ele- 
ment of our personality, is usually ascribed to what is 
merely particular in it. 

That language is a peculiar and constituent element 
of personality is quite obvious. Through language we 
speak not to others only, but to ourselves also. Speak- 
ing to ourselves means seeing within ourselves our 
own ideas, our soul, our very self in short, — it means 
self-consciousness, as the philosophers say, and there- 
fore self-control, clear vision of our acts, knowledge 
of what stirs within us; it means, therefore, living not 
after the manner of dumb animals, but as rational 
beings, as men. Man cannot think, have conscious- 
ness of himself, reason, without first expressing all 
that to himself. Man has been defined as a rational 
animal; he may also be defined as the speaking animal. 
The remark is as old as Aristotle. 

Man, however, this animal endowed with the faculty 
of speaking, is not man in general who never was, but 
the real man, the historical man, actually existing. 
And he does not speak a general language, but a certain 
definite one. 

When I speak before a public, I can but use my 
language, the Italian language. And I exist, that is 
I affirm myself, I come into real being, by thinking in 
conformity with my real personality, in so far as I 
speak, and speak this language of mine. My language, 
the Italian language. Here lies the problem. Were 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 23 

I not to speak, or were I to speak otherwise than I 
know how, I would not be myself. This manner of 
expressing myself is then an intrinsic trait of my per- 
sonality. But this speech which makes me what I am, 
and which therefore intimately belongs to me, could it 
possibly be mine, could I use it, mould it into my own 
life-substance, if, mine though it be, it were yet en- 
closed within me in the manner that every particle 
of my flesh is contained within my body, having nothing 
in common with any other part of matter co-existing 
in space? Could my language in short really be my 
language, if it belonged exclusively to me, to what I 
have called my particular or empirical personality? 

A simple reflection will suffice to show that my lan- 
guage, like a beacon of light, inwardly illumines my 
Thought, and renders visible to me every movement 
and every sense, only because this language is not ex- 
clusively my own. It is that same language through 
which I grasp the ancient authors of Italy. I read 
about Francesca da Rimini and Count Ugolino, and 
find them within me in the emotion of my throbbing 
soul. I read of Petrarch's golden-haired Laura, of 
Ariosto's Angelica, fair love of chivalrous men and 
the unhappy friend of youthful Medoro. I read 
of the cunning art whereby the Florentine secretary, 
in his keen speculative discourses, sought to establish 
the principalities and the state of Italy. I read of the 
many loves, sorrows, discoveries and sublime concepts 



24 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

which did not blossom forth from my spirit, but which, 
once expressed by the great men of my country, have, 
because of their merits, continued to exist in the imag- 
ination, in the intellect, in the hearts of Italians, 
and have thus constituted a literature, a light-shedding 
history which is the life of language, varied indeed and 
restless, but ever the same. This is the language which 
I first heard from the dear lips of my mother, which 
gradually and constantly I made my own by studying 
and reflecting on the books and on the conversations 
of those who for years, or days, or instants, were with 
me in my native town and exchanged with me their 
thoughts and their sentiments; the language which 
unites to me all those who, living or dead, together con- 
stitute this which I call and feel to be my own people. 

Yet I might want to break away with my speech 
from this glorious communion. I might try to demon- 
strate to myself that my speech is exclusively mine, 
and surely I would thus accomplish something. I 
would produce an exception which in this case too 
would serve to confirm the rule. 

For surely a man may devise a cryptic language, a 
cipher, a jargon. Secret codes and conventional cants 
are resorted to by individuals who have some reason to 
conceal their meaning from others. Such individuals, 
however, can form but very small groups, and because 
of the artificial character of their communications 
never may constitute a nation. An artificial jargon of 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 25 

this sort is however a language of some kind: it must 
be, since art imitates nature. It complies with the law 
that is immanent in the peculiar nature of language, 
namely, that there be nothing secret or hidden in it, for 
speech and in general every form of spiritual activity 
invests a community and aims at universality. The 
jargon is possible only because of the key by which it 
may be translated back into the common language. 
Give a ciphered document to the cr3^tographer; by 
study and ingenuity — that is by the use of that very 
intelligence which arbitrarily combined the cipher — he 
discovers the key; thus he too breaks up the artificial 
form, and draws from it the natural flow of a speech 
that is intelligible to all those who spe^k the same na- 
tional tongue. And again, words as they flow from the 
inspired bosom of the poet, when they first appear in 
the ^ freshness of the new artistic creation, do have 
something that is cryptic. That language is the poet's 
own; it never had been used by another; a jargon be- 
fore it is deciphered may be and is the language of a 
particular personality. But if we look more atten- 
tively, we shall see that in both cases the language is 
the language of the community. The inspired poet 
does indeed speak to himself, but with the conscious- 
ness of a potential audience, he utters a word to him- 
self which must eventually be intelligible to others be- 
cause it is by its nature intelligible. In the conditions 
in which the poet finds himself when speaking, he must 



26 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

use that word and no other, and any other person in 
those same spiritual conditions would use, could not 
help using, the same word. For his word is the 
Word, the one that is required by the circumstances. 
And since he is a poet, a serious mind uttering a word 
which needs no translation, it will be the word of 
his own people first and then of humanity at large, in 
so far as its beauty will inspire men of different na- 
tions and of diverse speech with the desire of learning 
the poet's own intimate language. 

All this is true because the spirit is universal activity, 
which, far from separating men, unites them. It real- 
ises historically its universality in the community of tlie 
family, of the city, of the district, and of the nation, 
and in every form of intimate aggregation and of 
fusion which history may call into being. 

Language may or may not be in the formation 
of a man's nationality. What however must be ever 
present is the Will by which man every moment 
of his life renovates his own personality. Can the 
Will, by which each one of us is what he is, be his own 
Will, exclusively his own? Or is the Will itself, like 
language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely 
a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that 
we live our own life while living the life of the nation? 

Of course, in the abstract, as I have explained above, 
my will is particular. But we must be reminded that 
Will is one thing, and faint wishing another. There 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 27 

is such a thing as real effective volition, and there is 
something which strives to be such and fails; this latter 
we might call "velleity." Real will does not rest sat- 
isfied with intentions, designs, or sterile desires; it 
acts, and by its effectiveness it reveals itself, and by its 
value shows its reality. And our being results not from 
velleities but from the real will. We are not what we 
might conditionally desire to be, but what we actually 
will to be. A velleity we might say is the will directed 
to an end which is either relatively or absolutely im- 
possible; will is that which becomes effective. 

But, then, when is it that my will really is effective, 
really wills'^ I am a citizen of a state which has 
power; this power, this will of the state expresses itself 
to me in laws which I must obey. The transgression 
of laws, if the state is in existence, bears with it the 
inevitable punishment of the transgressor, that is, the 
application of that law which the offender has refused 
to recognise. The state is supported by the inviola- 
bility of laws, of those sacred laws of the land which 
Socrates, as Plato tells us, taught his pupils to revere. 
I, then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its 
Law in such a manner that to will its transgression is 
to aim at the impossible. If I did so, I should be 
indulging in vain velleities, in which my personality, far 
from realising itself, would on the contrary be disinte- 
grated and scattered. I then want what the law wants 
hie to will. 



28 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

It makes no difference that, from a material 
and explicit point of view, a system of positive law does 
not coincide throughout with the sphere of my activity, 
and that therefore the major part of tlie standards of 
my conduct must be determined by the inner dictates 
of my particular conscience. For it is the Will of the 
State that determines the limits between the moral 
and the juridical, between what is imposed by the law 
of the land and what is demanded by the ethical con- 
science of the individual. And there is no limit which 
pre-exists to the line by which the constituent and 
legislative power of the State delimits the sphere sub- 
ject to its sanctions. So that positively or negatively, 
either by command or by permission, our whole con- 
duct is subject to that will by which the State estab- 
lishes its reality. 

But the Will of the State does not manifest itself 
solely by the enactments of positive legislation. It 
opens to private initiative such courses of action as 
may presumably be carried on satisfactorily without 
the impulse and the direct control of the sovereign 
power. But this concession has a temporary char- 
acter, and the State is ever ready to intervene as 
soon as the private management ceases to be effective. 
So that even in the exercise of what seems the un- 
trammelled will of the individual we discern the power 
of the State; and the individual is free to will some- 
thing only because the sovereign power wants him to. 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 29 

So that in reality this apparently autonomous particu- 
lar will is the will of the state not expressed in terms 
of positive legislation, there being no need of such an 
expression. But since the essence of law is not in the 
expression of it, but in the will which dictates it, or 
observes it, or enforces the observance of it, in the will, 
in short, that wills it, it follows that the law exists even 
though unwritten. 

In the way of conclusion, then, it may be said that 
I, as a citizen, have indeed a will of my own; but that 
upon further investigation my will is found to coincide 
exactly with the will of the State, and I want anything 
only in so far as the State wants me to want it. 

Could it possibly be otherwise? Such an hypothesis 
overwhelms me at the very thought of it. For it 
would come to this, — that I exist and my state does 
not: — the state in which I was born, which sustained 
and protected me before I saw the light of day, which 
formed and guaranteed to me this communion of life; 
the state in which I have always lived, which has con- 
stituted this spiritual substance, this world in which I 
support myself, and which I trust will never fail me 
even though it does change constantly. I could, it is 
true, ignore this close bond by which I am tied and 
united to that great will which is the will of my coun- 
try. I might balk and refuse to obey its laws. But 
acting thus, I would be indulging in what I have called 
velleities. My personality, unable to transform the 



30 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

will of the state, would be overcome and suppressed 
by it. 

Let us however assume for a moment that I might 
in the innermost depths of my being segregate myself. 
Averse to the common will and to the law of the land, 
I decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my 
thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, 
inaccessible summit rising out of the solitude. Up to 
a certain point this h3^othesis is verified constantly 
by the manner in which my personality freely becomes 
actual. But even then I do not act as a particular 
being: it is the universal power that acts through my 
personal will. 

For when we effectively observe the law, with true 
moral adhesion and in thorough sincerity, the law be- 
comes part of ourselves, and our actions are the direct 
results of our convictions, — of the necessity of our 
convictions. For every time we act, inwardly we see 
that such must be our course; we must have a clear 
intuition of this necessity. The Saint who has no will 
but the will of God intuitively sees necessity in his 
norm. So does the sinner in his own way: but his 
norm is erroneous and therefore destined to fail. 
Every criminal in transgressing the law obeys a pre- 
cept of his own making which is in opposition to the 
enactments of the state. And in so doing he creates 
almost a state of his own, different from the one which 
historically exists and must exist because of certain 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 31 

good reasons, the excellence of which the criminal him- 
self will subsequently realise. From the unfortunate 
point of view which he has taken, the transgressor is 
justified in acting as he does, and to such an extent that 
no one in his position, as he thinks, could possibly take 
exception to it. His will is also universal; if he were 
allowed to, if it were possible for him, he would estab- 
lish new laws in place of the old ones: he would set up 
another state over the ruins of the one which he under- 
mines. And what else does the tyrant when he 
destroys the freedom of the land and substitutes a new 
state for the crushed Commonwealth? In the same 
manner the rebel does away with the despot, starts a 
revolution and establishes liberty if he is successful; 
if not, he is overcome and must again conform his will 
to the will of that state which he has not been able to 
overthrow. So then, I exercise my true volition when- 
ever the will of my state acts in my personal will, or 
rather when my will is the realisation of the will of a 
super-national group in which my state co-exists with 
other states, acting upon them, and being re-acted 
upon in reciprocal determinations. Or perhaps better 
still, when the entire world wills in me. For my will, 
I shall say it once again, is not individual but uni- 
versal, and in the political community by which 
individuals are united into a higher individuality, 
historically distinct from other similar ones, we must 
see a form of universality. 



32 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

For this reason, then, we are justified in saying that 
our personality is particular when we consider it ab- 
stractly, but that concretely it realises itself as a 
universal and therefore also as a national personality. 
This conception is of fundamental importance for those 
of us who live in the class-room and have made of 
teaching our life's occupation, our ultimate end, and 
the real purpose of our existence. For in this con- 
ception of human activities we find the solution of a 
problem that has been present in the minds of thinking 
men ever since they began to reflect on the subject of 
education, or, in other words, from time immemorial. 
Education, we must remember, is not a fact, if by fact 
we mean, as we should, something that has happened, 
or is wont to happen, or must inevitably take place in 
virtue of the constancy of the law which governs it. 
We teachers are all sincerely convinced that education, 
as we speak of it, as it draws our interests, for which we 
work, and which we strive to improve, is not now what 
it was before. For there is no education that works 
out in conformity with natural laws. It is a free act of 
ours, the vocation of our souls, our duty as men. By it 
more nobly than by any other action man is enabled to 
actualise his superior nature. Animals do not educate: 
even though they do raise their young ones they yet 
form no family, no ethical organism with members dif- 
ferentiated and reciprocally correlated. But we freely, 
by an act of our conscience, recognise our children, 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 33 

as we do our parents and our brothers; and we discern 
our fellow-beings in ourselves and ourselves in others; 
and by the growth of our own we unconsciously develop 
the personality of others; and therefore in the family, 
in the city, in any community, we constitute one spirit, 
with common needs that are satisfied by the operations 
of individual activity which is a social activity. 

Man has been called a political or a social animal. 
He might therefore be considered also as an educating 
animal. For we do not merely educate the young ones, 
our young ones. Education being spiritual action 
bearing on the spirit, we really educate all those that 
are in any way and by any relations whatsoever con- 
nected with us, whether or not they belong to our fam- 
ily or to our school, as long as they concur with us in 
constituting a complete social entity. And we not only 
train those of minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, 
and still frequent the schools and are busily intent 
upon developing and improving their skill, their char- 
acter, their culture. We also educate the adults, the 
grown-up men and women, the aged; for there is no 
man alive who does not daily add to his intellectual 
equipment, who does not derive some advantage from 
his human associations, who could not appropriately 
repeat the statement of the Roman emperor — nulla 
dies sine linea. Man always educates. 

But here, as in every other manifestation of his spir- 
itual activity, man does not behave in sole conformity 



34 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

with instinct; he does not teach by abandoning himself, 
so to speak, to the force of natural determinism. He 
is fully aware of his own doings. He keeps his eyes 
open on his own function, so that he may attain the 
end by the shortest course, that he may without wast- 
ing his energies derive from them the best possible 
results. For man reflects. 

It is evident then that education is not a scheme 
which permits pedagogues and pedants to interfere 
with their theories and lucubrations in this sacred task 
of love, which binds the parents to the children, brings 
old and young together, and keeps mankind united in 
its never ceasing ascent. Before the word came into 
being, the thing, as is usually the case, already existed. 
Before there was a science and an incumbent for the 
chair, there existed something that was the life of this 
science and therefore the justification of the chair. 
There was the intent reflectiveness of man, who in 
compHance with the divine saying, "Know thyself," 
was becoming conscious of his own work, and there- 
fore, unwilling to abandon his actions to external im- 
pulses, began to question everything. What the lower 
animal does naturally and unerringly through its in- 
fallible instinct, man achieves by the restless scrutiny 
of his mind. Ever thoughtful, always yearning for 
the better, he searches and explores, often stumbling 
in error, but ever rising out of it to a higher station 
of learning and of art. Our education is human, be- 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 35 

cause it is an action and not a fact; because it is a 
problem that we always solve and have to keep solving 
for ever. 

This intuitive truth is demonstrated experimentally 
to us by the very lives we live as educators. As long 
as the freshness of our vocation lasts, as long as we 
can remain free from mechanical routine and from the 
impositions of fixed habits; as long as we are able to 
consider every new pupil with renewed interest, dis- 
cover in him a different soul, unlike that of any other 
that we have previously come in contact with, and 
differing within itself from day to day; as long as it is 
still possible for us to enter the class-room thrilled and 
throbbing in the anticipation of new truths to reveal, 
of novel experiments to perform, of unexpected diffi- 
culties to overcome, in the full consciousness of the 
rapid motion of a life ever renewed in us and around 
us by the incoming generations, that flow to us and 
ebb away unceasingly towards life and death; so long 
shall we really live and love the teacher's life, so long 
shall we demonstrate to ourselves and to others the 
truth I have already affirmed. 

We teachers should be constantly on our guard 
against the dangers of routine, against the belief that 
we have but to repeat the same old story in the same 
class-room, to the same kind of distant, blank faces, 
staring at us in dreary uniformity from the same 
benches. We shall continue to be educators only as 



36 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

long as we are able to feel that every instant of our 
life's work is a new instant, and that education there- 
fore is a problem that insistently stimulates our in- 
genuity to an ever renewed solution. 

Now the most important of all tasks, ancient and 
modern, in the field of education is this, — the task of 
the teacher to represent the Universal to his pupils, 
the Universal, of course, as historically determined. 
Scientific thought, customs, laws, religious beliefs are 
brought before the pupil's mind, not as the science, 
the laws, the religion of the teacher, but as those of 
humanity, of his country, of his period. And the 
pupil is the particular individual who, having entered 
upon the process of education, and being submitted, 
so to speak, to the yoke of the school, ceases to enjoy 
his former liberty in the pursuit of a spiritual endow- 
ment and in the formation of his character, and, 
in consequence of this educational pressure, bends 
compliantly before the common law. Hence the world- 
old opposition to the coercive power of the school, and 
the outcry raised from time to time against the privilege 
demanded by the educator, who on the strength of the 
assumedly higher quality of his beliefs, his learning, 
his taste, or his moral conscience, claims to interfere 
with the spontaneous development of a personality in 
quest of itself. 

On one side education undoubtedly assumes the task 
of developing freedom, for the aim of education is to 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 37 

produce men; and man is worthy of this name only 
when he is a master of himself, capable of initiating his 
own acts, responsible for his deeds, able to discern and 
assimilate the ideas which he accepts and professes, 
affirms and propagates, so that whatever he says, 
thinks, or does, really comes from him. Our children 
are said to be properly raised when they give evidence 
of being able to take care of themselves without the 
help of our guidance and advice. And we trust that 
we have accomplished our task as educators when our 
pupils have made our language their own and are able 
to tell us new things originally thought out by them. 
Freedom then must be the result of education. 

But on the other hand, teaching implies an action 
exercised on another mind, and education cannot there- 
fore result in the relinquishment and abandonment of 
the pupil. The educator must awaken interests that 
without him would for ever lie dormant. He must 
direct the learner towards an end which he would be 
unable to estimate properly if left alone, and must help 
him to overcome the otherwise unsurmountable ob- 
stacles that beset his progress. He must, in short, 
transfuse into the pupil something of himself, and out 
of his own spiritual substance create elements of the 
pupil's character, mind, and will. But the acts 
which the pupil performs in consequence of his train- 
ing will, in a certain measure, be those of his teacher; 
and education will therefore have proved destructive 



38 EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 

of that very liberty with which the pupil was originally 
endowed. Is it not true that people constantly attri- 
bute to early family influences -and to environment — 
that is, to education — the good and the bad in the 
deeds of the mature man? 

This is the form in which the problem usually pre- 
sents itself. The mind of the educator is therefore 
torn by two conflicting forces: the desire zealously to 
watch and control the pupil's growth and direct his 
evolution along the course that seems quickest and 
surest for his complete development; and, on the other 
hand, the fear that he may kill fertile seeds, stifle 
with presumptuous interference the spontaneous life 
of the spirit in its personal impulses, and clothe the 
individual with a garment that is not adapted for 
him, — crush him under the weight of a leaden cape. 

The solution of this problem must be sought in the 
concrete conception of individual personality; and 
this will be the theme of the next chapter. But I must 
at the very outset utter an emphatic word of warning. 
My solution does not remove all difficulties; it cannot 
be used as a key to open all doors. For as I have 
repeatedly stated, the value of education consists in 
the persistence of the problems, ever solved and yet 
ever clamouring for a new solution, so that we may 
never feel released from the obligation of thinking. 

My solution must be simply accepted as affording a 
guidance by which different people may, along more 



EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY 39 

or less converging lines, approach their particular ob- 
jectives. For the problem presents itself under ever- 
changing forms, and demands a continuous develop- 
ment, and almost a progressive interpretation of the 
concept which I am going to ofifer as an aid to its 
solution. No effort of thinking^ once completed, will 
ever exonerate us from thinking, from thinking un- 
ceasingly, from thinking more and more intensively. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FUNDAMENTAL ANTIMONY OF 
EDUCATION 

A MORE precise determination must now be given to 
the problem, touched upon in the preceding chapter, 
which might be called the fundamental antinomy of 
education, understanding by "antinomy" the conflict 
of two contradictory affirmations, either one of which 
appears to be true and irrefutable. 

The two contradictory affirmations are (i) that 
man as the object of education is and must be free, 
and (2) that education denies man's freedom. They 
might perhaps be better re-stated in this way: (i) 
Education presupposes freedom in man and strives to 
increase it. (2) Education treats man by ignoring 
the freedom he may originally be endowed with, and 
acts in such a way as to strip him entirely of it. 

Each of the two propositions must be taken, not as 
an approximate affirmation, but as an exact enunciation 
of an irrefutable truth. Therefore freedom here means 
full and absolute liberty; and when we speak of the 
negation of freedom, we mean that education as such, 
and as far as it is carried, destroys the freedom of the 
pupil. 

40 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 41 

Let us first see precisely what is meant by this 
freedom which we attribute to man. Each one of us 
firmly even though obscurely possesses some concep- 
tion of it. Every one of us, even though unfamiliar 
with the controversies that have raged for centuries 
on the question of free will, must have sometimes 
been compelled by the conditions of human life to 
face the difficulties that beset the concept of man's 
freedom, and must have been led to question, if not 
to deny outright, the proposition that man is free. 
But on the other hand, every one of us has to admit 
that the experience of life has confirmed the belief 
in our freedom which for a moment had been shaken 
by doubt and perplexity; and that faith, instinctive 
and incoercible, outlives every time the onslaughts of 
negation. 

By liberty we mean that power peculiar to man by 
which he moulds himself into his actual being and 
originates the series of facts in which every one of his 
actions becomes manifest. In nature, all facts, or, as 
they are called, all phenomena appear to us to be so 
interrelated as to constitute a universal system in which 
no phenomenon can ever be considered as absolutely 
beginning, but can in each case be traced back to a pre- 
ceding phenomenon as its cause, or at any rate as 
the condition of its intelligibility. The condensation 
of the aqueous vapour in the cloud produces rain; 
but vapour would not condense without the action 



42 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

of temperature, nor again would temperature be 
lowered without the concurrence of certain meteor- 
ological facts which modify it, etc. 

But we believe on the other hand that man derives 
from no one but himself the principles and the causes 
of his actions. So that whenever we see in his conduct 
the necessary effects of causes that have acted on his 
character or momentarily on his will, we cease to con- 
sider such acts as partaking of that moral value 
through which man's conduct is really human and com- 
pletely sundered from the instinctive impulses of the 
lower animal, and even more so from the behaviour of 
the forces of inanimate matter. 

We may in certain moments deny a man's humanity, 
and see in his conduct only brutal impulse, fierce 
cruelty, and unreasoning bestiality. In such moments 
we cannot stop either to praise or to blame him. We 
do not even strive to reason with him, for we feel 
that arguments would produce no impression on his 
obdurate consciousness. Only through force can we 
defend ourselves from his violence; against him we 
must use the same weapon that we rely upon in our 
struggle with the wild beasts and the blind forces of 
nature. We then become aware that our soul refuses 
to recognise such an individual as a man. We esteem 
man to be such only when we believe that we can in- 
fluence him by words, by arguments that are directed 
to reason, which is the birthright of man, and when 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 43 

we are able to prevail upon those sentiments of his 
which, as peculiarly human, appear to be almost 
the foundation and the understructure of rational 
activity. This reason and these sentiments it must 
be remembered are the peculiar constituents of 
human personality. They cannot be imparted to man 
from the outside. They are in him from the very 
start even if only as germs which he must himself 
cultivate, and which will, when developed, enable 
him to act consciously, that is, with full knowledge 
of his acts. This knowledge is twofold, for he knows 
what he is doing, and he knows also how his actions 
must be judged. And so all the causes that bear 
on him are practically of no weight in determining 
a course which he will take, if he is a man, only 
after the approval of his own judgment. What is more 
natural than to avenge an insult, and to harbour hatred 
against an enemy? And yet from the viewpoint of 
morals, man is worthy of this name only in so far as 
he is able to resist his overpowering passions and to 
release himself from that force which compels him to 
offset harm with more harm, and meet hatred with 
hatred. He must pardon; he must love the enemy 
who harms him. Only when a man is capable of 
understanding the beauty of this pardon and of such 
love, only when, attracted by their beauty, he acts no 
longer in compliance with the force of instinctive 
nature, does he cease to count as a purely natural 



44 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

being, and lift himself to a higher level into that moral 
world where he must progressively exhibit his human 
activities. Whether man is equal to this task or not, 
we must demand that he satisfy this requirement before 
we admit him into the society of mankind. He must 
have in himself the strength to withstand the pres- 
sure of external forces which may act on his will, on 
his personality, on that inner centre from which his 
personality moves towards us, speaks to us, and thus 
affirms its existence. We make these demands on him; 
and as we extol him when by his deeds he shows suffi- 
cient capacity for his human role, so we also blame 
him every time we find him through weakness yielding 
to these forces. And the import of our blame is that 
he is responsible for not having the power which he 
should have had. 

It is of no importance that out of compassion, or 
through sympathy for human frailty, we lighten or 
even entirely remove the burden of our censure. Our 
disapproval of the deficiency, even though unexpressed, 
remains within us side by side with the conviction that 
the delinquent may do a great deal, nay, must, aided 
by us in the future, do everything in his power to meet 
successfully the opposing forces of evil. We surely 
cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through 
moral impotence — whether it be the craven submissive- 
ness of the coward, or the undaunted violence of the 
overbearing brute — commits an evil deed. We feel it 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 45 

our duty to watch over him and help him on the road 
to redemption, because of our firm conviction that he 
will eventually redeem himself; for he is after all a man 
like the rest of us, and possesses therefore within him- 
self the source and principle of a life which will raise 
him from the slough in which he lies immersed. 

There is, however, a pseudo-science which, on the 
basis of superficial and inaccurate observations, dog- 
matically asserts that certain forms of criminality 
give evidence of original and irremediable moral de- 
pravity; and that therefore persons tainted with it 
are fatally condemned never to heed sufficiently the 
voice of duty and ever to yield to their perverted 
instinct, which presses unrestrained from the depths of 
their being at the slightest provocation and on the 
occasion of the most insignificant clash with other 
human beings. 

This is the doctrine of the modem school of criminal 
anthropology which has spread throughout the world 
the fame of some Italian writers. Though their in- 
fluence is now on the wane, their observations on the 
pathological nature of criminal acts have contributed 
to establish the need of a more humane treatment of 
offenders, — more humane because rational and ef- 
fective. 

Their doctrine falls in with a series of systems which 
at all times, and always for materialistic motives, — 
materialistic even though disguised under religious and 



46 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

theological robes, — have denied to man that power 
which we call liberty, compelling him therefore to bend 
down under the stress of universal determinism, and to 
behave as the drop that forever moves with the motion 
of the boundless ocean, an insignificant particle of the 
entire watery mass. What force intrinsic to this drop 
could ever stop it on the crest of the wave which hurls 
it forward? Man, they say, is no different from this 
drop: from the time of his birth to the instant of his 
death, hemmed in by all the beings of nature, acted 
upon by innumerable concurrent causes, he is pushed 
and dragged at every moment by the irresistible cur- 
rent of all the forces of the entire mass of the universe. 
At times he may delude himself into believing that he 
has lifted his consciousness out of the huge flood, that 
it is within his power to resist, to stop it as far as he is 
concerned, and to control it; that, in short, it rests 
with him to fashion his own destiny. But alas! 
this very belief, this illusion is the determined result 
of the forces acting upon him: it is the inevitable effect 
of the play of his representations, — representations 
which have not their origin in him, but have been im- 
pressed upon him by outside forces. So that the illu- 
sion of independence is but a mocking confirmation of 
the impossibility of escaping the rush of fatal currents. 
I shall not here give a critical presentation of the 
arguments by which systems such as these have 
established the absence of freedom in man. In our 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 47 

present need, a single remark will suffice, and will per- 
mit us, I believe, to cut the discussion short. A great 
German philosopher, who had conceived science and 
reality, which is the object of science, in such a way 
as to preclude the possibility of finding in reality a 
place for man's freedom, noticed that freedom, in spite 
of all the difficulties which science encounters in ac- 
counting for it, corresponds and answers to an invinci- 
ble certitude in our soul, invincible because a postulate 
of our moral conscience. That is to say, that whatever 
our scientific theories and ideas, we have a con- 
science which imposes a law upon us, — a law which, 
though not promulgated and sustained by any external 
force, or rather because of it, compels us in a manner 
which is absolute. This law is the moral law. It 
requires no speculative demonstration. The scrutiny 
of philosophers might not be helpful to it. It rises 
spontaneously and naturally from the intimate recesses 
of our spirit; and it demands from our will, from 
the will of the most uncouth man, an unconditional 
respect. What sense would there be in the word duty, 
if man were able to do only those things which his 
own nature, or worse still, nature in general, compelled 
him to do? The existence of duty implies a power to 
fulfil it. And the certitude of our moral obligations 
rests on the conviction that we have within us the power 
to meet them. We can answer the call of duty because 
we are free. 



48 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

This consideration, important as it is, cannot how- 
ever be considered as sufficient. For this moral 
conscience, this certitude with which the moral con- 
science affirms the existence of an unavoidable duty, 
might also be an illusion determined in us by natural 
causes. Nothing hinders us from thinking thus, and 
surely there is no contradiction implied in this explana- 
tion, which in fact because of its possibilities is offered 
by the philosophers of materialism. 

But the need of liberty is not solely felt when we 
strive to conceive our moral obligations; freedom is 
not only the ground for existence, the raison d'etre of 
moral law, as Kant thought — for he is the philosopher 
to whom I alluded above; — no! freedom is the condi- 
tion of the entire life of the spirit. And the materialist 
who, having destroyed liberty as a condition of moral 
conduct, believes that he is still able to think, that his 
intellectual activity can proceed undisturbed after his 
faith in the objective value and in the reality of moral 
laws has been abandoned, such a materialistic thinker 
is totally mistaken. For without freedom, man not 
only is unable to speak of duty, but he cannot speak at 
all, — not even of his materialistic views. This is 
the same as saying that the negation of liberty is un- 
thinkable. 

A brief reflection will make this clearer. We speak 
to others or to ourselves in so far as we think, or say 
something or make affirmations. Let us suppose that 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATipN 49 

ideas be present to our minds (as people have some- 
times imagined) without our looking at them, without 
our noticing them. Such ideas would have offered 
themselves in vain, in the same way that many material 
objects remain unseen before us, because we do not 
turn our gaze toward them. Every object of the mind, 
that is, every thought, can only be thought because in 
addition to it we too are in the mind : our mental activ- 
ity is there, the ego of the thinking man, the subject 
which is ready to affirm the object. And thought 
proper consists in this affirmation of the object by the 
subject. Now, the subject, that is, man, must be as free 
in the affirmation of his thought, by which he thinks 
something, as he must be free in every one of his 
actions in order that his action be truly his, and really 
human. In fact, we demand of man that he give 
an account of his thoughts as well as of his deeds. 
We evaluate not only what he does, but also what he 
thinks; we praise him or we disapprove of him 
because of his sayings, that is, his thoughts, and we 
call upon him to correct those thoughts which he 
should not entertain. In this way we indicate our 
conviction that the thought of each one of us is not 
simply a logical consequence of its premises, not an 
effect determined by a psychic mechanism set in 
motion by the universal mechanism of which our 
individual psyche is a part; we are convinced that 
thought depends upon man, upon his capacity, upon 



50 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

his personality, which is not controlled by any 
mechanical forces, nor subject to premises which 
he may no longer modify once he has accepted 
them. We are the masters of our thinking; and if the 
vigour of the human personality is indeed shown by the 
steadfast constancy whereby in practical life we pursue 
a hard and toilsome course toward an arduous goal, it 
is revealed just as much by the quickness, the readi- 
ness, the assiduousness, the lack of prejudice, the love 
which we manifest in our search after truth. 

It has therefore been said that cognition in man has 
moral value, and that on the other hand the will is 
operative in the act of the intellect. Such distinctions 
are dangerous. But whether we call it will or intellect, 
the activity which makes us what we are, by which we 
actualise our personality, also by thinking, it is certain 
that it is a conscious and discriminating activity, 
through no force of gravity precipitating on its object, 
but approaching it with selective freedom of determina- 
tion. And in the manner that every action aims at the 
good, because it seems good, and appears in contrast 
with evil, so every cognition is the affirmation of what 
to us is or seems to be a truth in opposition to error 
and falseness. Without the antithesis of good to evil 
there would be no moral action : without the antithesis 
of the true to the false there would be no cognition. 
But the existence of this antithesis implies a choice 
and therefore the liberty of choosing. 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 51 

Should we deny freedom, and consequently abandon 
man to the determinism of the causes acting upon 
him, we should deny the possibility of distinguishing 
between good and evil, between true and false. The 
materialist, therefore, when he rejects freedom, is com- 
pelled to affirm that the value which moral conscience 
attributes to goodness is devoid of any real grounds, 
and what is worse, that his very statement is thereby 
stripped of all the value of truth. For he must be 
inwardly convinced that what he thinks has no reason 
to be thought and therefore cannot be thought. 

The negation of freedom leads to this absurdum, 
to this impossible thought, which is the Thought that 
is being thought as such, and yet does not admit of 
being thought. Man, in so far as he thinks, affirms 
his faith in freedom, and every attempt on his part 
to uproot this faith from his soul is but a glaring con- 
firmation of its existence. This observation, properly 
grasped, is sufficient to establish human freedom on a 
solid ground. 

Freedom, moreover, which man needs in order to be 
human, cannot be, as some have supposed, a relative 
liberty, limited and restricted by certain conditions, 
for conditional liberty does not differ from slavery. 
Here indeed is the very crux of the problem. Every 
one would readily admit the existence of a limited 
freedom, and the divergence would then be reduced to 
a question of degree. But the fact is that freedom 



52 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

must be absolute or not be at all. Matter, that is, 
every material object, is not free for the very reason 
that it is limited; whereas the spirit — every spiritual 
act — is free because it is infinite, and as such not re- 
lative to any thing, and therefore absolute. 

Any limitation of the spirit would annihilate its lib- 
erty. The slave is such because his will is constrained 
within the bounds imposed upon it by the master's 
volition. The human spirit is not free in the presence 
of nature because nature envelops it and enfolds it 
within narrow confines, which allow only a certain 
development; and this development therefore cannot 
be looked upon as a grant of nature but rather as a 
condemnation, in that it marks out boundaries 
which cannot be trespassed. The lower animal is not 
free because even if its actions seem to imply a ration- 
ality not very different from that of man, yet in reality 
its acts, differently from the doings of man, follow the 
straight line pre-established by instinct, which admits 
of no original power and allows no individual creation. 
If there is a limit, there must be something limiting and 
something limited; there must be a necessary relation- 
ship of one to the other, so that the thing limited can in 
no way free itself from the consequences of this rela- 
tionship. These consequences are summed up in the 
impossibility of being all, or in other words in the 
necessity of remaining within limits, and to obey there- 
fore the untransgressable laws set by one's own nature. 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 53 

This necessity which binds every natural being to the 
laws of its own nature, this impossibility of being aught 
else than what is appointed by nature, to be a wolf of 
necessity, and of necessity to be a lamb; this is the 
hard lot of natural beings, this is the destiny from 
which man is ransomed by the power of his freedom. 
The sculptor in the fervour of his inspiration, 
which proceeds from the image that lives in his phan- 
tasy, searches eagerly for the marble with which, as 
though from the very bosom of nature, he may call to 
life the phantom of his mind. He fails in his search, and 
his chisel remains, must need remain, inactive. The 
artist then in the utmost intensity of his creation is 
baffled by an external impediment, by an obstacle of 
nature which therefore seems to have the power of lim- 
iting his creative power. But when we consider what 
the artist has created in the statue itself, in this living 
image of marble, we find nothing that is material. The 
artist has transfused into the stone an idea, a senti- 
ment, a soul, which we, under the influence of the rav- 
ishing power of artistic beauty, are able to seize to the 
exclusion of all material attributes; as though we no 
longer possessed eyes for the whiteness of the marble 
and were deprived of the muscle which gives us the 
impression of its physical weight. When we are able 
thus to spiritualise the statue — and we do so every 
time we get to know it as a work of art — then all limi- 
tations that might be imposed on the creative power of 



54 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

the artist disappear. For we see no longer the artist's 
phantasy, and then his arm, and then his hand, his 
chisel, the block which he is carving; all we see is the 
phantasy soaring untrammelled in the infinite world of 
the artist, with his arm, his hand, his marble, his uni- 
verse which is totally different from the universe in 
which the men live who quarry the marble and move 
it and sell it. 

There is a point of view from which we see the spirit 
limited and enslaved by the conditions in which its 
life is unfolded. But there is a higher point of view to 
which we must ascend if we are bent on discovering 
our freedom. If we say, as the psychologists do, this> 
is a soul and this is a body, here are sensations, there 
is motion, this is thought within us and that is the world 
outside of us, then we are obliged to consider the spirit 
as conditioned by physical happenings to which in some 
manner our internal determinations correspond. It is 
not possible to see without eyes and without the light 
that strikes them. It is equally impossible not to 
see when we have eyes and are surrounded by light, 
and according to the greater or lesser velocity of the 
luminous waves, we shall of necessity discern now one 
colour and now another. And the objects thus seen by 
us will determine our thoughts; and in turn our voli- 
tions will depend upon these thoughts; and our char- 
acters will be shaped accordingly, and we shall be this 
or that man in conformity with the determination of 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 55 

circumstances. Man, according to this conception, will 
be the result of time, of place, of environment, of every- 
thing except of his own self. 

But there is a higher point of view than the one I 
have just described, and to it we must rise, if we mean 
to understand our nature, — this marvellous human na- 
ture which was first disclosed to our consciousness at 
the advent of Christianity and in the course of time 
made more and more manifest, until it now loudly pro- 
claims in us our human dignity exalted above the 
forces of nature, and is empowered by its cognitive 
faculty to dominate these forces, which must bend 
to man's purposes without ever blocking or obstruct- 
ing his progress. WTiosoever says: here is a body 
and there is a soul — two things, one outside of the 
other — such a man does not consider that these two 
things are two terms distinguished and differentiated 
by thought in the bosom of thought, that is to say, 
of the soul: of that soul which is truer than the 
other for the obvious reason that the latter thinks and 
therefore reveals its soul-nature by its own acts, 
whereas the former is the object of thinking, is a thing 
thought, and may therefore be a fallacious entity, an 
idolon, and a simple ens rationis, like so many other 
things that are thought and are subsequently found to 
have no kind of subsistence. In speaking of sensation 
and of motion which generates or somehow conditions 
sensation, we lose sight of the fact that sensation is 



56 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

truly enough a determination of consciousness, but in 
the same manner as the motion which is encountered 
in consciousness when the latter, in thinking, among 
other things thinks the displacement of objects in space. 

For everything is within consciousness, and no way 
can be devised of issuing forth from it. We say 
that the brain is external to consciousness, and that 
the cranium encloses the brain, which in turn is en- 
veloped by space luminous and airy, space filled with 
beautiful plants and beautiful animals; yet the fact re- 
mains that brain and skull and everything else are the 
potential or actual object of our thinking faculty, and 
cannot but remain therefore within that consciousness 
to which for a moment we supposed them to be external. 
We may start thinking, keeping in mind this inde- 
structible substance of our thought; and as we proceed 
from this centre in which we have placed ourselves as 
subjects of thinking, and advance towards an ever- 
receding horizon, do we ever come in sight of the point 
where we must pause and say: "Here my thought ends; 
here something begins that is other than my thought"? 
Thought halts only before mystery. But even then it 
thinks it as mystery, and thinking it, transforms it, and 
then proceeds, and so never really stops. 

Such being the true life of the spirit, rightly have we 
called it universal. At every throb it soars through the 
infinite, without ever encountering aught else than its 
own spiritual actualisations. In this life, such as we 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 57 

see it from the interior when we do not fantastically 
materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free 
because it is infinite. 

Education then posits this liberty in the pupil, for it 
presupposes in him a susceptibility of development, — 
educability, as we may call it. The learner could 
not possibly be educable, that is, susceptible of receiv- 
ing instruction, unless he were able to think. But 
thinking, we have already seen, signifies freedom. And 
not only is freedom presupposed by the educator, but 
it is the very thing he is aiming at in his work. As a 
result of his teaching, liberty must be developed in 
the same manner that the capacity for thinking and all 
modes of spiritual activity are developed. For the de- 
velopment of thought is a development of reflection, a 
constant increase of control over our own ideas, over 
the content of our consciousness, over our character, 
over our whole being in relation to every other being. 
And this growth of power is what we mean when we 
speak of the development of our freedom. It has been 
said, in fact, that education consists in liberating the 
individual from his instincts. Surely, education is the 
formation of man, and when we say man we mean 
liberty. 

Here we stumble upon our antinomy. How are 
we to reconcile this presupposition and this aim of the 
educator with his interference in the personality of the 
pupil? This interposition surely signifies that the dis- 



58 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

ciple must not be left to himself and to his own re- 
sources; that he has to clash with something or some- 
body that is not his own personality. Education im- 
plies a dualism of terms, the teacher and the learner; 
and it is this dualism which destroys the freedom, which 
sets a limit, and therefore annihilates infinity in which 
freedom consists. The disciple who encounters a 
stronger mastering will, an intellect equipped with a 
multitude of ideas, with an experience which forestalls 
his own powers of observation, and his innate zeal for 
investigation, sees in this more potent personality either 
a barrier obstructing his progress towards a goal which 
he spontaneously would attain; or else a goad which 
hurries him along the way which he would have indeed 
chosen of his own accord, but along which he would 
have liked to advance freely, calmly, joyously, as our 
Vittorino da Feltre would have it, and without any un- 
welcome compulsion. This pupil then would want to be 
left alone in order that he might be free, as free as 
God when as yet the world was not and he created 
it out of nothing by his joyous fiat, symbol of the 
loftiest spiritual liberty. 

For these reasons we have come to believe that the 
most serious problem of education is the agreement be- 
tween the liberty of the pupil and the authority of the 
teacher. Therefore great masters who meditated on 
the subject of education, from Rousseau to Tolstoi, 
have exalted the rights of liberty, but have fallen into 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 59 

the opposite extreme of denying the duty to authority, 
and have pursued in their abstractions a vague and un- 
reahsable ideal of negative education. 

But we must not cling to negatives. It should be 
our purpose to construct, not to destroy. The school, 
this glorious inheritance of human experiences, this 
ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit kindles and 
sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of 
undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be de- 
stroyed. Let the school live, and let us cling to the 
teacher and maintain his authority, which limits the 
spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. For this limi- 
tation is only apparent. 

Apparent, however, when we deal with true educa- 
tion. For the school has for centuries been the victim 
of a grave injustice. People have been led to consider 
the classroom as a place of confinement and of punish- 
ment, and teachers have been cruelly lashed by the 
scourge of ridicule cracked in the face of pedantry. 
Through this injustice, the school has been burdened 
with faults that are not its own, and teachers, genuine 
educators, have been confused with the pedantic drill- 
masters that are the negation of intelligent education 
and of inspired ethical discipline. In order to see 
whether education really limits the free activity of the 
pupil, we must not consider abstractly any school, 
which may not be after all a school. We must examine 
an institution at the moment and in the act which 



6o THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

realises its significance — when the instructor teaches 
and the pupils are learning. Such a moment should at 
least hypothetically be granted to exist. 

Let us take a concrete example and consider a 
teacher in the act of giving lessons in Italian. Where 
is this something which I have called the Italian lan- 
guage? In the grammar, perchance? Or in the dic- 
tionary? Yes, partly. Provided grammar can invest 
its rules with the life of the individual examples that 
together constitute the expressive power of the living 
language; and provided the dictionary does not wither 
up all words in the arid abstraction of alphabetical 
classification; does not hang each of them by itself as 
limbs torn from the living body of the speech in which 
they had so often resounded and to which they will 
be joined again in the fulness of life and expressive- 
ness; but does instead incorporate, as every good dic- 
tionary should, complete phrases, living utterances of 
great authors or perhaps of that nameless many-souled 
writer that somewhat confusedly is called the people. 

But more than in the grammar and more than in the 
dictionary, the word is and exists in the writers them- 
selves. The teacher should there point it out, as he 
guides his pupils through the authors who were able 
to express most powerfully our common thoughts. To 
his students who are striving to learn the language — 
that is the writers — he reads for example the poems of 
Leopardi. The poet's word, his soul hovers over the 



THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 6i 

classroom, as the master reads. It penetrates into the 
minds of the pupils, hushes every other sentiment, re- 
moves every other thought, and throbs within them, 
stirs them, arouses them. It becomes one with the soul 
of each pupil, which speaks to itself a language of its 
own, using, truly enough, the words of Leopardi, but of 
a Leopardi who is peculiar to each of the listeners. 
Under this spell, the pupil who hears the poet's word 
echoing in the depths of his being, will he stop to reflect 
that this word is the echo of an echo? That he is under 
the influence of something repeated after a first utter- 
ance? Our own experience answers: No! But if any 
of the audience become absent-minded, if they should 
lose the rapt delight of poetical exaltation communi- 
cated to their soul by the teacher's voice, and should 
say that the word they hear is not their own but the 
master's, or rather, the poet's, then they would commit 
a serious blunder. For the word they intently listen to 
in their soul is their own, exclusively their own. Leo- 
pardi does not impart any poesy to him who, through 
his love, his study, and the intensity of his feelings, is 
unable to live his own poetry. And Leopardi (or the 
teacher who reads him) is not materially external to 
the enraptured listener; he is his own Leopardi, such 
as he has been able to create for himself. The master, 
as St. Augustine long ago warned us, is within us. 

He is within us even if we see him in front of us, 
away from us seated in his chair. For in so far as he 



62 THE ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 

is a real teacher, he is ever the object of our conscious- 
ness, surrounded and uplifted in our spirit by the rever- 
ence of our feelings and by our trustful affection. He 
is our teacher, he is our very soul. 

The dualism then is non-existent when we are edu- 
cating. We do notice it before, and we are thus brought 
to examine the antinomy; but the difficulty is removed 
by the very act of education itself, by the first word 
that comes to the pupils' ears from the lips of the 
teacher. The dualism however cannot be resolved if 
the master's word fails to reach the pupils' soul, but 
then under those circumstances there is no education. 
But even in such cases, if the teacher is not sluggish, 
if he displays a real spiritual power, the abiding exis- 
tence of the barrier between the two minds proves help- 
ful to the spiritual growth of the learner, who, because 
of his incoercible freedom, is impelled by the insuf- 
ficiency of the master to affirm his personality with in- 
creased vigour. So that the school is a hearth of liberty, 
even in spite of the intentions of the teacher. A 
school without freedom is a lifeless institution. 



CHAPTER IV 

REALISM AND IDEALISM IN THE 
CONCEPT OF CULTURE 

We found it necessary in the previous chapter to pass 
from the abstract to the concrete in order to arrive 
at the truth. The universality of the individual was 
made clear when for the empirical concept of the 
individual, abstractly considered, we substituted the 
deeper and more speculative one of the individual him- 
self in the concreteness of his relationships. In like 
manner, the fundamental antinomy of education was re- 
solved as soon as we replaced the abstract idea of the 
dualism of teacher and pupil, by the idea of their intrin- 
sic, profound, unseverable unity as it gradually works 
out and is actualised in the process of education. We 
were enabled therefore to conclude that the real teacher 
is within the soul of the pupil, or, better still, the teacher 
is the pupil himself in the dynamism of his develop- 
ment. So that, far from limiting the autonomy of the 
disciple, the master, as the propulsive element of the 
pupil's spontaneity, penetrates his personality, not 
to suppress it, but to help its impulses and facilitate 
its infinite development. 

The same method of resorting to the concrete now 

63 



64 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

leads us to the determination of a third essential ele- 
ment in the process of education. We have spoken of 
the master, and we have spoken of the pupil, — of the 
latter as becoming actual as universal personality, of 
the former as becoming identical with this same per- 
sonality. We must now take up the connecting link 
between the two, that is, culture. By culture we mean 
the content of education, the presupposed heirloom 
which in the course of time must pass from the teacher 
to the pupil. This spiritual content, in being appre- 
hended, appears under different aspects: as erudition 
and information; as formation of personal capacities 
and training of spiritual activities; as art and science; 
as experience of hfe and as concept and ideal of exist- 
ence; as simple cognition and as a norm of conduct. 
It includes everything that comes within the scope of 
teaching, and from whose value education derives its 
peculiar worth. 

Culture, so defined, may be conceived of in two 
ways; and in as much as their differences are highly 
significant in the sphere of education as elsewhere, 
we must now somewhat carefully consider them. 

These two ways correspond to two opposite concep- 
tions of reality, and as such they pertain to philosophy. 
But men in general constantly have recourse to them, 
and so it happens that people frequently indulge in 
philosophic speculations without knowing it; and much 
philosophising goes on outside of the schools of the 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 65 

specialists, who are few compared to the great number 
of those who in their own way handle genuine concepts 
of philosophy. 

Let us begin from the most obvious of these concepts, 
from the one which is fundamental and original to the 
human mind. Our whole life, if we consider the data 
of experience, seems to unfold itself on the substratum 
of a natural world, which therefore, far from depending 
on human life, represents the very condition of it. 
In order to live, to act, to produce, or in any way to 
exercise an influence on the external world, we must, 
first of all, be born. Our birth is the effect of a life 
which is not our life, which step by step rises and grows 
and spreads until it gathers all nature within itself. 
This nature existed before we were born, it will con- 
tinue to be after we are all dead. Men draw their life 
from an organic and inorganic nature which had to 
exist in order that they might come into being. When 
nature will cease to provide these conditions, human 
life, according to this point of view, will come to an 
end; but nature, transformed, chilled, darkened, dead, 
will yet continue to be. 

On this living trunk of nature our own Hfe is grafted; 
animals come into existence, and among animals the 
human species. Each of us, as he comes into the 
world, finds this nature, developed, abundant, diversi- 
fied in millions of forms, traversed by innumerable 
forces, organised up to the most highly developed struc- 



66 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

tures, man included. We find this nature, and we begin 
to study it. We examine its parts one by one, their 
complexity, and the difference of their functioning. 
For each one of them has its peculiar way of being and 
of acting; it has its "laws." The aggregate of these 
laws, mutually corresponding, and integrating one 
another, constitutes the natural world — reality — as it 
stands before us. With this external reality we strive 
to become acquainted; and in order that we may live 
in it we either adapt ourselves to it, or adapt its con- 
ditions to ourselves. In this reality too we acquire the 
knowledge of the needs of our organism and of the 
means by which they may be satisfied, — the ratio, so 
to speak, between natural desires and controlled re- 
sources. 

We are also told that our organism is in constant 
change and hurries on to its destination, to our death, 
which we abhor as passionately as we cherish life, but 
which we accept because such is the law of human 
life, fatal and inexorable; for reality is what it is, 
and we must adapt ourselves to it. 

But if reality appears as constituted before us, as 
therefore conditioning our existence, and as existing in- 
dependently of us; if it is indifferent to reality whether 
we be in it or not; if we are truly extraneous to it, the 
conclusion must then be drawn that we, from the out- 
side, presume to know reality and to move about it 
without being this reality itself or any part of it. For 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 67 

all reality is thought by us as a connected whole, 
though indeed vaguely; in its totality it is regarded as 
an object known to us, but existing in utter independ- 
ence of this knowledge of ours. Its whole process is 
therefore complete in objective nature, which conditions 
our spiritual life, and this in turn can mirror reality 
but can never be a part of it. 

This then is the primitive and fundamental concept 
that the human mind forms of reality. In consequence 
of it man feels that he is enclosed within himself: he 
knows he is producing the dreams and the fair images 
of art; that he can construct inwardly abstract geo- 
metrical figures and numbers; that he can generate 
ideas. But he also feels that between these ideal crea- 
tions of his own, and the solid, sound, real living forms 
of nature, there is an abyss. He must, indeed, fall in 
with nature, in the process of generating other living 
beings of flesh and blood. He must avail himself of 
nature by first submitting to its unfailing laws, if he 
intends to give body, that is, real existence, to the ideal 
conceptions of his intelligence. On one side then we 
have thought; on the opposite side reality, — that real- 
ity, Nature. 

This conception at a certain moment is transformed 
but not substantially changed. As we begin to reflect, 
we notice that this nature, as known to us, is not the 
real external nature, the nature which is unfolded in 
time and space, which we see before our eyes, an object 



68 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

perceptible by our bodily senses. We conclude then, 
that nature as known to us is an idea; that Nature 
is one thing and the idea of nature another. And if we 
think this perceptible nature and have faith in its real- 
ity and in the reality of its determinations, this nature 
in which reality is made to consist is the nature which 
is within our thought, — the idea of nature; or in other 
words, thought considered as the content of our mind. 
This thought is the aim of all the inquiries by which 
we strive to become thoroughly acquainted with nature, 
and which we finally discover or at least ought to dis- 
cover when we succeed in attaining true knowledge. 
We say that we know nature only when we are 
able to recognise an idea in nature: that is, an idea in 
each of its elements, and a system of ideas in the whole 
of nature. So that what we know is not really nature 
as it presents itself to our senses, still less nature as 
it is, before it has impressed our senses; but nature as 
disclosed to us by thought, as it exists in thought — 
i. e., the idea. And this idea must be real, otherwise 
nature, which has its truth in the idea, could not be 
real. Not only is it real, it is that reality itself which 
a moment ago we were led to think of as consisting in 
external perceptible nature. 

This reality makes the life of our thought possible, 
but it is not a product of this life. It is a condition 
and a prerequisite of thought, and as such it does not 
exist because we think it: but rather we are able to 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 69 

think it because it exists. It is eternal truth, at first 
unknown to man, then by him desired. In quest of it 
he gradually lifts on all sides the veil which hides it 
from his eyes, without however hoping that it will ever 
entirely disclose to him its divine countenance. 

According to this transformed point of view, then, 
reality, which in the first instance appeared to be 
natural, that is physical or material, has now become 
ideal. But even thus it remains extraneous to thought, 
and unconcerned with the presence or the absence of 
it; transcending the entire life of the human spirit, and 
incessantly subject to the danger of error. Whereas 
the idea as a complexus of all ideas that can be 
thought (but have not been thought, or rather have 
not all been thought) is the beacon of light that guides 
the way of man in the ocean of life; it is Truth pure 
and perfect. 

This idea evidently must not be confused with the 
purely subjective ideas which we spoke of above, and 
which as such are extraneous to reality. This idea is 
reality itself idealised. It is to this idea, for instance, 
that we all appeal when we affirm the existence of a jus- 
tice superior to that of which man is capable, of a jus- 
tice in behalf of which man is in duty bound to sacrifice 
his private interests, and even his life. This idea we 
have in mind when we speak of a sacred and inviolable 
right, whereas in daily practice there is perhaps no right 
which is not more or less trampled upon. This idea 



70 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

is before us when we consider truth in general: truth 
which is indeed real, even though it may not be seen or 
felt, much more real than physical nature, for nature 
comes to life and dies and constantly changes, while 
truth is motionless, impassible, eternal. In its bosom 
then we must try to find everything that we want to 
accept as not illusory. 

But in substituting the conception of an ideal reality 
for the conception of a material one, reality as a whole 
continues to be something contradistinguished from us, 
an object indeed of our thoughts, but one which can- 
not be conceived as it is in itself except by abstracting 
it from our own thought. 

We, then, who open our eager eyes in the endeavour 
to discover, to know, to orient ourselves, to live in the 
midst of a known and familiar world ; we, thinking be- 
ings, and not simply things of nature, beings who as 
such affirm our personality in the very act of saying 
We, we then are of less account than the earthworms 
which crawl along until they die unknown to the foot 
that crushes them. We are nothing because we do not 
belong to reality; we deceive ourselves into believing 
that we are doing something on our own account, but 
in truth we renounce every desire of doing or creating 
something original, something we might really call 
ours; and we abandon ourselves, we drift away con- 
fused with external reality and submerged under the 
irresistible current of its laws. 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 71 

This conception of life, which I have given only in 
its barest outline, is a very common one. For thou- 
sands of years it has persisted in the philosophical 
field, the nourishment and the torment of the greatest 
intellects of humanity. But humanity could not rest 
satisfied with a world conceived in such a manner; 
with a world which, whether we call it nature or idea, 
is at bottom always nature. For by nature we under- 
stand not only that reality which is in space and time, 
but also every reality which is not the product of 
our will, nor the result in general of that spiritual 
activity, which in a manner peculiar to all human acts 
reveals a diversity of values, extending from the sub- 
limity of heroism and of genius to the lowest depths 
of cowardice and to the gloom of sloth. Nor can it 
be considered as the product or result of a process; 
for it is immediate reality, original and immutable. 
In a world which is Nature, man is an intruder, a 
stranger without rights, without even real existence. 
As a being, he is destined to be suppressed; nay, he 
does not even exist. And his life, with all his aspira- 
tions, his needs, his claims, is but a fallacious illusion 
which will sooner or later collapse. Man cannot help 
succumbing in a world where there is no place for 
him. Therefore a more or less cloudy gust of pessi- 
mism lowers over the consciousness that has stopped 
at this conception of reality. Leopardi is the most 
eloquent expression of the intense misery to which 



72 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

man is condemned in such circumstances, or to which 
rather he condemns himself. He condemns himself be- 
cause he has it in his power to conceive reality other- 
wise. For let him ponder seriously and he will succeed 
in convincing himself that the naturalistic conception of 
reality is absurd. Philosophy has so demonstrated this 
truth, that he who now strives eagerly to attain a moral 
point of view in harmony with established principles 
can no longer repeat that note of pessimism, can no 
longer assert that the world is nature, or that it is the 
eternal idea from which nature is derived and by which 
it is made intelligible. Such views are no longer ten- 
able. 

The teacher who, because of his lofty mission, claims 
the right of forming souls, of arousing those powerful 
moral energies which alone empower man to live as a 
human being, may not, must not be ignorant of the 
fact that the contention of naturalism, which makes of 
the world an abstract reality, presupposed by the 
human spirit and therefore anterior and indifferent to 
it, is a belief that has been superseded and surpassed 
by modern thought. The teacher too can easily grasp 
this view, for in gathering all the arguments by which, 
along different lines, the new conception of reality has 
been attained, we find that the whole matter reduces 
itself to a simple and very easy reflection. Very easy 
in itself, though it may seem difficult to the greater 
part of us, — to the superficial thinkers, to the absent- 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 73 

minded, to those who lack the strength neces- 
sary to face the great responsibility imposed upon us 
by the truth which is derived from this reflection. 

For naturalism reduces itself to the affirmation that 
we think nature, but do not ourselves exist; nature 
alone exists. We do not exist and yet we think, and 
we think of nature as existing. We do not exist and 
yet nature exists, of whose existence we have no other 
testimony than our thoughts. And if thought is a 
shadow, what will reality then be? The "dream of a 
shadow," in the words of the Greek poet. Is it pos- 
sible for us to stop at this conclusion? Is it possible 
for an inexistent thing to vouch for the existence of 
something which we know only from its attestations? 
Such is the absurd position we are forced into when we 
assume that Thought, in equipoise with reality, remains 
outside of it and leaves it out of its own self. 

We give the name of realism to that manner of think- 
ing which makes all reality consist in an external exist- 
ence, abstract and separate from thought, and makes 
real knowledge consist in the conforming of our ideas to 
external things. By idealism on the other hand we 
mean that higher point of view from which we discover 
the impossibility of conceiving a reality which is not 
the reality of thought itself. For it reality is not the 
idea as a mere object of the mind, which therefore can 
exist outside of the mind, and must exist there in 
order that the mind may eventually have the means 



74 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

of thinking it. Reality is this very thought itself 
by which we think all things, and which surely 
must be something if by means of it we want 
somehow to affirm any reality whatsoever, and 
must be a real activity if, in the act of thinking, it will 
not entangle itself in the enchanted web of dreams, 
but will instead give us the life of the real world. If 
it is not conceivable that such activity could ever go 
forth from itself and penetrate the presumably exist- 
ent world of matter, then it means that it has no need 
of issuing from itself, in order to come in contact with 
real existence; it means that the reality which we call 
material and assume to be external to thought is in 
some way illusory; and that the true reality is that 
which is being realised by the activity of thought itself. 
For there is no way of thinking any reality except by 
setting thought as the basis of it. 

This is the conception, or, if you will, the faith, not 
only of modern philosophy, but of consciousness itself 
in general, of that consciousness which was gradually 
formed and moulded under the influence of the deeply 
moral sentiment of life fostered by Christianity. For it 
was Christ that first opposed to nature and to the flesh 
a truer reality, — not the world in which man is born, 
but that world to which he must uplift himself: that 
world in which he has to live, not because it is anterior 
to him, but because he must create it by his will : and 
this world is the kingdom of the spirit. 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 75 

In accordance with this conception there is, properly 
speaking, no reality: there is a spirit which creates real- 
ity, which therefore is self-made and not the product 
of nature. The realist speaks of external existence, of 
a world into which man is admitted and to which he 
must adapt himself. But the ideahst knows only what 
the spirit does, what man acts. A nature, ever at work 
in the progress of the spirit, throbs in the soul of man, 
who with his intellect and his will re-creates it by its 
restless, unceasing motion. It is a world which is never 
created, because the entire past flows and becomes 
actual in that form which is peculiar to it and in which 
it exists, namely, the present, — history in the inces- 
sant rhythm of its becoming, in the ever-living act of 
self-production. 

On what side of the controversy should the teacher 
stand who means to absorb into his soul the life of the 
school? Will he with the realists believe in a reality 
which must be observed and verified? Or will he as an 
idealist trust that the only world is the one which is 
to be constructed by him; that in all this task he 
can rely only on the creative activity of the spirit that 
moves within us, ever unsatisfied with what is, inces- 
santly aspiring for what does not yet exist, for what 
must come to be as being the only thing which deserves 
to exist and to fulfil life? 

There are then these two ways of conceiving culture, 
the realistic and the idealistic. By the former we are 



76 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

led to imagine that man's spirit is empty, and that no 
nourishment can come to it except from the outside 
world, from those external elements which he can ac- 
quire because they exist prior to the activity by which 
he assimilates them. The latter, admitting only what 
is derived from the developing life of the spirit, can^ 
conceive of culture solely as an immanent product of 
this very life, and separable from it only by abstrac- 
tion. 

It is evident that the ordinarily accepted view of 
educators to-day is realistic rather than otherwise. 
The ideal and therefore the historical origin of the 
school itself is intimately connected with the realistic 
presupposition. For the school begins when man for 
the first time becomes aware of the existence of a store 
of accumulated culture which should be protected from 
dispersion. Grammar, for instance, exists before the 
notion of teaching it arises. Men already possess a 
language when they make up their minds to teach it to 
their children. Self-taught and inventive genius, by 
new observation and discoveries, gives rise to new dis- 
ciplines; and men, discovering the value of such disci- 
plines, determine to institute a school where they may 
be cultivated and handed down to the coming genera- 
tions. In general then, first comes knowledge; then the 
school as a depository of it. It may be granted that 
the progress of learning is made possible or at least 
accentuated by educational institutions; but the fact re- 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 77 

mains that the school is founded on pre-existing knowl- 
- edge. Science, arts, customs must exist before they can 
be taught to others, and they do exist, but not in the 
spirit of the one who is to acquire them, who must 
appropriate them as they are in themselves. The 
Iliad exists: Homer sang: the poems attributed to 
him were collected into an epic from which we learn 
of the beliefs, of the aspirations, and of the memories 
that were dear to the ancient Greeks, and every culti- 
vated person to-day must derive from them his own 
spiritual substance. The teacher shows to his pupils 
how best to read, how to understand that epic which is 
a treasure of the past bequeathed not only to the mod- 
ern Greeks but to humanity in general. For we all 
profit from this inherited spiritual wealth in the same 
manner that every man that comes into the world en- 
joys the light and the heat of the sun which he surely 
did not kindle in heaven. 

The fact that culture, as the subject matter of educa- 
tion, exists before the exercise of that spiritual activity 
which can be educated only through its means, seems to 
the realist a condition without which the school cannot 
arise. Only as culture develops and spreads does the 
school grow and expand; and, in the progress of civi- 
lisation, as culture becomes specialised, the school is 
correspondingly differentiated into institutions of ever- 
growing specialisation. For the school can but follow 
and reflect the advance of science, of letters, of art, — 



78 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

of humanity in general in all its strives to perpetuate. 
All this evidently can be maintained only from the 
point of view of the realist. For him the school is con- 
cerned not with those that already know and therefore 
have no need of it, but for those who are still ignorant. 
For them it is instituted; it ministers to their needs, 
and is therefore adjusted in the direction in which it 
believes their spirit should be oriented. In the school 
of physicians, there is not medicine but the learning of 
it, for if the art of healing were already mastered as it 
seems to be in the case of the professors, there would 
be no need of a medical school. There is indeed the 
professor in the lecture room; but he is there only for 
the learners, and his role has no meaning except in 
relation to their needs. He is the possessor of science, 
and as such he teaches and does not learn. The school 
then is not the possession of culture, but the develop- 
ment of a spiritual life aspiring to this possession; 
and this aspiration is possible because of the existence 
of the teacher who has already mastered it, who pos- 
sesses it, not as his own property, but as social wealth 
entrusted to him for the use of everybody. He himself 
is only an instrument of communication. Culture ante- 
dates him; it does so even when he is the author of 
it. For it is not possible for him to impart it to others 
until he has first elaborated it himself, and not until 
the merits of his contributions have been in part at 
least recognised by the world. 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 79 

The school to the realist presupposes the library. 
The teacher needs books, plenty of books in order 
to increase his knowledge and thus become better 
acquainted with that world through which he has to 
pilot his pupils. In the books, then, in the long shelves, 
culture lives: in the innumerable volumes that no one 
ever hopes to read; in the shelves which contain a world 
of beautiful things, and so valuable that man, as Horace 
says, should spend sleepless nights in order to acquire 
them, should endure cold and heat, fatigue and sacri- 
fice. For humanity, we are told, lives in those volumes 
to which the teacher must somehow link himself if he 
intends to advance properly, to live the life which our 
forefathers have generously endowed for us, and to 
protect our spiritual inheritance from dispersion. In 
this atmosphere he must live; he must plunge in that 
spiritual sea which rolls limitless across the centuries. 
The pupil looks out upon this ocean which allures 
every man who is born to the life of culture. At first 
he clings to the shore, dreads the water, and asks to be 
helped until he has at least become familiar with the 
element. Who will encourage the beginner to leave 
the dry land and plunge into the deep where he would 
meet sure destruction? He must first be trained in 
some sheltered cove, where protected from the violence 
of the tumultuous surf, from the might of the indi- 
visible mass of the ocean, he may gradually learn 
the wa)^ of the deep. 



8o REALISM AND IDEALISM 

The student must accordingly begin with a definite 
book; he must be saved from the haunting power of 
the library, which draws the youthful mind towards 
every volume, towards every subject. In the multi- 
tude of books, not all of them read, not all of them 
readable, thought founders, sees nothing, thinks noth- 
ing, is unable to rest in any of the things which he 
imagines exist in the vast library shelves. He must 
choose. Let him select, say, Dante. He reads the 
Divine Comedy, the poem written by that great Italian 
who has been dead these six centuries and now rests 
at Ravenna, no longer mindful of his Francesca, of his 
magnanimous Farinata, of his kindly master Brunetto, 
or of Beatrice. Dante created his miraculous world, he 
breathed life into his characters, wrote the last line of 
his last canto, smiled in rapture at the divine beauty 
of his creation, now complete and perfect, and died. 
His manuscript was copied thousands of times; and 
after the discovery of printing, millions of copies were 
made. In one of these we now are able to find it, this 
divine poem, just as it was written, — for we want it 
exactly as it flowed from his pen without the change 
of a letter, without the omission of a comma. And this 
volume is an example of what exists in a library, — of 
the culture that teachers strive to find there, and thence 
communicate to their pupils! — something that be- 
longs to the world, something which is a part of real- 
ity, which men therefore can grasp, if they want to, 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 81 

just as they can get to know the stars and the plants, 
and all things of nature. The Divine Comedy can be 
realistically conceived in respect to us who open the 
volume and prepare to read it, for the reason that it 
already exists and arouses our desire. If we had left it 
on the shelf where it was resting, it would have had 
exactly the same existence. What we find in the vol- 
ume, as we read of that land of the dead which is much 
more living than all the living beings who surround us 
in our daily life, would all of it have been in that 
book, would have continued to be there, even if we had 
never opened it. 

But is it really so? If we reflect a while we shall 
see that this is not the case. The book contains exactly 
what we find there, what we are capable of finding 
there, nothing more, nothing less. Different persons 
discover in it different things, but it is nevertheless ob- 
vious that for each individual the book contains only 
what he finds in it; and in order to be able to say that 
the book contains more than what a given reader dis- 
covers in it, it is necessary that some other person 
should find that something more; and that the text con- 
tains this additional beauty is only true for him who 
discovered it and for those who seek it after him. 

Dante waited for centuries for De Sanctis ^ to appear 
and to disclose the meaning of Francesca's words. 

* Francesco de Sanctis, a great Italian critic, whose "History of 
Italian Literature" is still unfortunately inaccessible in English. 



82 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

Therefore it has been said that to understand Dante is 
a sign of greatness. Abstractly considered, of course, 
the poet is what he is, but only in the abstract. In 
the concrete, Dante is the author whom we admire 
and appreciate proportionately to our power. For as 
we read the poem in accordance with our training, and 
the development of our personality, Dante is grafted 
on a trunk which did not exist before us, which, on the 
contrary, is our very life; and before this life is real- 
ised, evidently none of those things can be found there 
which actually come into being in the process of its 
realisation. So that if we had not read the book, far 
from its being true that everything we found in it would 
still continue to be there, nothing would remain of 
what we find in it^ absolutely nothing. 

We have said nothing of "what we find." But if we 
consider the matter we shall see that what we find is 
everything; everything for me; everything for every- 
body. Only that can come out of a book which the 
reader with his soul and with his labours is capable of 
getting out of it; and in consequence of these labours 
and in virtue of his soul he is able to say that a certain 
book has a content. In fact, to return to our example, 
the Divine Comedy which we know, the only one which 
we can know, the only one which exists, is the one 
which lives in our souls, and which is a function of 
the criticism that interprets it, understands it, and 
appreciates it. That Divine Comedy therefore did not 



REALISM AND IDEALISM 83 

close the circle of its life on the day when Dante wrote 
the last line of the last canto; it continued to live, still 
continues to exist in the history, in the life of the spirit. 
Its life never draws to a close. The poem is never 
finished. 

This is true of the poem of Dante; it is true of every- 
thing which we conceive of as inherited from our great 
predecessors, from those who built up the patrimony of 
human culture. Culture then is not before us, a treas- 
ure ready to be excavated from the depths of the earth, 
awaiting to be revealed to us. Culture is what we our- 
selves are making; it is the life of our spirit. 

Abstract culture, on the contrary, is merely as real- 
istically conceived. It slumbers in the libraries, in the 
sepulchres of those who lived, who passed away and 
created it once for all. It belongs to the past, to the 
things that have died. But the past, if we really mean 
to grasp it, if we want to see it close by as something 
that is and not merely as an abstraction, the past itself, 
becoming the present, made into that actuality which 
we call living memory, is history, — history constructed 
by us, meditated by us, re-created by us, in accordance 
with our abilities; — and with our powers of evocation 
we awaken the past from its slumber and breathe into 
it the life of the spiritual interests, of the ideas, of the 
sentiments that are, after all, the living substance 
in which the past really survives, in which it is real. 
In the same way the only culture that can be be- 



84 REALISM AND IDEALISM 

stowed upon the spirit, the only one that admits 
of being concretely taught and learned, the only one 
that can be sought, because it is the only one that really 
exists, is idealistic culture. It is not in books, nor in 
the brains of others. It exists in our own souls as it 
is gradually being formed there. It cannot therefore 
be an antecedent to the activity of the spirit, since it 
consists in this very activity. 

This must be the faith of all those who cannot bring 
themselves to believe that they are strangers in this 
world, and that they have come here to exercise a func- 
tion which is not their own. For the world in general, 
and the sphere of culture in particular, is not completed 
when we arrive upon the scene. This is why human 
life has a value, why education is a mission. 



CHAPTER V 

THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

The idealistic conception of culture enables us to get 
an initial understanding of the spirituality of the 
school. This spirituality is surely felt by all those who 
live within the class-room ; but it should be understood 
in the most rigorous and absolute manner by those who 
wish to have a deeper consciousness of the extreme deli- 
cacy of the tasks performed and the words uttered by 
those who enter it with the sincere heart and the pure 
soul of the teacher. 

The school is obviously not the hall which contains 
the teacher and the pupils. These may have a hall, 
may even have the teacher, without yet possessing the 
school, which consists in the communication of culture. 
This culture, we have seen, is not really pre-existent 
to the act which communicates it; it is not to be found 
in books, not to be looked for in an ideal transcendent 
world, not to be demanded of the teacher. It is only 
in the spirit of the person who is in the act of learning. 
It is there in the manner in which it is possible for it 
to be there, not comparable to any presumed form of 
pre-existing culture. The school gains its existence 
entirely in the soul of the learner. 

85 



86 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

Knowledge is not to be found beyond the bounds of 
the human spirit. I insist on this conception because 
I am well aware that the minds of many rebel against 
this conclusion, no matter how irrefutable its grounds 
may be. For they ask: what then is the learning which 
we ascribe to the master minds of humanity, now in- 
deed dead but still active in their works? They also 
ask how we are able to think and account for that 
learning which we feel we are not originating, which 
we know we are re-acquiring for ourselves after it has 
many times been in the domain of others. 

Can we really consider as non-existent what we as 
yet do not know, may perhaps never know, but which 
is none the less capable of being known? When we 
are filled with reverence for the glory of men whose 
learning surpasses our powers, are we the victims of 
an illusion? Are we prevailed upon by ignorance and 
lack of reflection? And how then can we justify the 
cult which every civilised man consecrates to the 
mighty spirits — philosophers, poets, artists, and heroes 
— who added so much to the moral fund of humanity? 
Was there not a Dante six centuries back, who com- 
posed a lofty poem, which was admired by everybody, 
at a time when we, who now read it and bring it to life 
in our souls, were still so far removed from the entrance 
of this life? 

The answer to all these questions is very simple, so 
simple that we must be careful lest we miss its signifi- 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 87 

cance. All this lore of the past which we strive to pre- 
serve surely does exist; it does contain all the names 
which are sacred to the memory of humankind. The 
Divine Comedy has been written and no longer awaits 
its Dante. But this lore of the past, as we for brevity's 
sake call it, is nothing else than what we think as such. 
History, as it unfolds itself from century to cen- 
tury, is never compressed within a past which because 
of its completeness might be made to exist beyond the 
present and in opposition to it; but it exists in a past 
which is in, the present as a plant that grows or an 
animal that lives, never adding anything new to the 
old, always transforming the old into the new; at no 
time, therefore, having anything but what is new, never 
being anything else but the new. In history, thus com- 
prehended, we to-day are but one person with the men 
who thought before us, with the poets, the philosophers, 
the spiritual creators of the past. With them we are 
a person that grows and develops, ever acquiring, never 
losing; a single being that apprehends and recalls and 
constantly makes all his past bear fruit in the present. 
Our childhood has not completely passed away into 
nothing: it keeps returning to the ever-busy phantasy 
that tenderly fondles it, cherishes it, idealises it into 
poetry. If we consider this childhood as something 
that once was, that existed in utter ignorance of this 
poetry that was yet to be written, that could not then 
be written, surely this infancy is quite dead ; we should 



88 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

rather say that it never existed. But it does live as 
the childhood which is a recollection, which arouses 
feelings, and such feelings as are at a given moment 
the actual sentiment of the adult. Once in the years 
long gone by a kindly word reached the depths of my 
soul. We all have heard in the years long gone by some 
such kindly words that in the mystery of our childish 
mind appeared as a revelation. Such words as fall from 
the lips of a mother and inspired by her tender affection 
have the secret power of appeasing us in a moment of 
rage, and of making us feel the gentle sweetness of 
that goodness which is made of love. We may since 
have forgotten that word, and the circumstances in 
which it was uttered: but it is none the less true that 
on that day our soul was modified and became endowed 
almost with a sixth sense. This sense has enabled us 
subsequently to perceive so many things that are beau- 
tiful in life, and it in turn grew stronger because of 
frequent use and increasing exercise, until it finally 
became the most potent organ of our moral personality. 
Here too our development has been a constant acquir- 
ing with no losing: a preserving of the past by which it 
was converted into the present, and therefore annulled 
as past pure and simple. 

Such is the moral development of man, who believes 
himself an individual, but is in truth humanity consid- 
ered momentarily in one of its fragments. Such is his- 
tory: the unfolding of the spirit in its universality. It 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 89 

is not therefore difficult to determine what is the past 
culture in which we desire to graft our present one. It 
is our own actual culture in so far as it is not the patri- 
mony, not the spiritual life of the isolated individual, of 
a particular being; but is instead the life of the spirit 
in its universality, the development of the human per- 
sonality taken in its effective, historical concreteness. 

The past with its entire content is a projection of our 
actual consciousness, i. e., of the present. But we must 
not give this proposition a sceptical sense. As I have 
already pointed out, the present neither in the particu- 
lar individual nor in the universal history of the spirit, 
is sundered from the past by that abyss which is ordi- 
narily seen from a materialistic point of view. The 
past is one and the same thing with the present. The 
past is the present in its inmost substance; and the 
present is the past that has matured. The grain of 
wheat which was buried in the furrow is now no longer 
to be found under the glebe. It lives, multiplied in the 
ear of wheat. The seed as such was decomposed and 
destroyed in the soil; it is there no more, it sprung 
thence as a blade of grass, it grew, was transformed, 
still is, still lasts, and will continue to endure in other 
forms. Where is it now? Why, in whatever form it 
may now have assumed. It is the past in the present, 
as the present. 

So then, what is Dante the poet who towers over 
the centuries, the object of our admiration, the master 



90 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

of all who speak and use the Italian language? He is 
the lordly poet of the fourteenth century, not because 
he then lived his own individual life, but because he 
survives to-day in us who think him, who appreciate 
him even when we are not fully acquainted with him. 
In this sense he lives in us, as the seed does in the ear 
of corn. 

I have just hinted at the possibility of appreciating 
something, without fully understanding it. I wanted to 
make clear how impossible it is to separate, with a clean 
cut, knowledge from ignorance. It is far from true that 
before taking up a certain science we know absolutely 
nothing about it, — that the boy who goes to school for 
the first time is completely devoid of all knowledge, or 
that he who is in quest of a book which he has never 
read can in no way whatever speak about it. 

For fair renown begets love for the unseen person, 
as the poet reminds us and as experience often teaches. 
Frequently we know of the existence and the beauty 
of a woman whom we have never seen, but who is not 
therefore completely unknown to us. So also many 
of us desired to go to school long before we had 
seen the inside of a classroom. What is dearer than 
the Joy foretasted at the first imaginings of school? 
We look forward to that new life upon which 
we are about to enter in the company of our bigger 
brothers and of our older playmates. They have told 
us so many things about it. From their accounts and 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 91 

from the fond memories of our parents we already 
know the school before we approach it, and its pleasing 
aspects invite us into the classroom. 

For the same reason we search for books we have 
never seen, and we are drawn towards new studies and 
pursuits. There is no leaping from ignorance to knowl- 
edge, as from pitch darkness to noon-tide brilliancy. 
The transition is imperceptible, as when the dim morn- 
ing twilight merges into the first glimmerings of dawn, 
which in turn fade away under the dazzling flashes of 
sunrise. And even from the midst of darkness we 
yearn for a world which though unseen is somehow 
present to our consciousness, already illumined by our 
thought, warmed by our sentiments. Or, in other 
words, the culture which we do not yet possess, and 
which we expect to get at school, is already implanted 
in our mind, where it will sprout and grow and bear 
fruit, fused and confused with the life of our spirit. 

Having now reached this point, can we define cul- 
ture? I am inclined for a moment to assume the role 
of Don Ferrante in Manzoni's novel.^ By pedantic 
ratiocinations he proved that the plague could not be 
a contagious disease: "for," he said, "in nature every- 
thing is either a substance or an accident," Contagion, 
he then went on to prove, could neither be the one nor 
the other; therefore the plague was but an influx of the 
stars, and there could be no use in taking precautions; 

^ I Promessi Sposi ("The Betrothed"). 



92 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

and having proved this, he fell a victim to the epidemic, 
and died cursing the stars like an operatic hero. Let 
us follow for a moment in the footsteps of this pedant, 
whose method, ridiculous as it may seem, has had 
nevertheless a glorious history, and one which Man- 
zoni himself admired. 

I say: We can think only and we do think only two 
kinds of reality, — person or thing. Every one of us 
is naturally drawn to this distinction; and when we 
have formulated it, we feel more or less vaguely, more 
or less clearly, that every possibility is comprised within 
these two terms, that outside of them it is impossible to 
think any reality whatsoever. The reason is this: if 
we think, if we act, if we live, we inevitably place our- 
selves in a-Mtuation such that we on one side are as 
centre, as beginning, or as subject of our activity; and 
on the other side are the objects toward which our ac- 
tivity is directed and by which it is terminated. We 
therefore as subject of the entire surrounding world; 
and this world as the end of our thoughts and of our 
scientific inquiries, end of our desires and of our prac- 
tical activity; the world which is represented in our 
consciousness, and which we strive to dominate by our 
labours, and our reason. Can there be anything else 
beside us and what we think? 

The world which we think and which we oppose to 
ourselves seems at first to contain different kinds of 
objects. There seem to be both persons and things; 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 93 

simple objects of cognition which we ordinarily call 
things which can never become subjects; and persons 
who at first are represented to us as objects of our 
knowing, of our love, and of our hatred, as ends of our 
activity; but who under a closer scrutiny are trans- 
formed before our eyes into knowing and acting sub- 
jects, who, in other words, become just exactly what we 
are. But when we really get to know these beings that 
surround us as subjects on an equal basis, then we 
cease to consider them as objects of our cognition, and 
as solely endowed with that material objectivity which 
at first put them in the same category with the inani- 
mate things, with plants and animals. We then find 
them close to us, very close : fused with our own spirit- 
ual substance. We feel them to be our f elk w men, our 
kinsmen, with whom we constitute that person of whose 
existence I am aware every time I say We: the person 
we must take into account whenever we wish to affirm 
our personality in a concrete manner, the only person, 
the one subject, the true subject of human knowledge 
and of human activity. The subject which knows and 
acts as a universal in the interests of all men, or rather 
in behalf of the one man in whom all single individuals 
are united and with whom they are all identified. 

Then if we give a rigorous and exact meaning to the 
expressions, *'We and what is before us," "We and the 
objects," "We and the World," we have a correct 
classification of all thinkable reality differentiated into 



94 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

persons and things, but with the understanding that all 
persons are in reality one Person. 

One person, and things innumerable! As we look 
about us, we find the horizon peopled with thousands 
and millions and infinite quantities of objects, which 
may one by one attract our attention, and may be 
gathered up in the vast, unbounded picture sur- 
veyed by the eye as it moves on from thing to thing, 
incessantly, without ever reaching the last. The 
world which we first discover is the world of matter, 
of things which strike our senses. This world 
rushes impetuously into our mind at the beginning 
of our natural experience. And these material 
objects are many not only de facto but also de jure. 
They must be, they cannot but be many if we are to 
consider them as material things. It is their peculiar 
nature, it is their very essence to be an indefinite multi- 
tude. 

A material thing means a thing occupying space. 
And space is made up of elements, each one of which 
excludes all the others and is therefore conceived inde- 
pendently of the others, must so be conceived. For 
it is the very nature of space to be divisible. When 
it is narrowed down to a point and cannot be further 
subdivided, then it ceases to be space. Its divisibility 
signifies that space is nothing more than the sum of its 
parts; that it contains nothing in addition to these 
parts; that it therefore resolves itself into them without 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 95 

at all losing its being and without any of the parts 
being deprived of anything which was theirs in the 
whole. In fact, if an3^hing were lost of the entire 
whole, this loss could not but be felt in each single 
part. A book, considered as a material thing, is com- 
posed of a certain number of printed leaves stitched 
together; and if the leaves fall apart, they may be 
brought together again so that they will compose the 
same book as before. An iron rod weighs the same 
before and after it has been broken up into parts. 

Things cease to be exclusively and solely material 
when, though they may be divisible in a certain respect, 
they are nevertheless indivisible in another respect. 
Plants, animals, all living organisms, considered simply 
as objects occupying space and as therefore having 
certain dimensions, admit surely of being separated into 
parts. Trees are cut into logs, sawed into boards; 
animals are slaughtered and quartered. But considered 
from the point of view of its peculiar quality, of the 
essential property which distinguishes it from all other 
bodies, an organism is not divisible. If we do divide 
it, each component part ceases to be what it previously 
was when conjoined with the others. Such a part can- 
not be preserved; it withers, it decays, and is dispersed, 
so that the whole can never be reconstituted. The vari- 
ous parts of an organism, considered as such, are in- 
separable, because each of them is and maintains itself 
on the strength of its relations to the others, forming 



96 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

with them a true and essential unity. If we however 
try to find out what this unity is by which all the limbs 
are indissolubly held together, we shall discover nothing 
which can be observed and represented spatially, noth- 
ing endowed with dimensions, however small, after the 
manner of the several limbs which this unity fuses 
within itself and vivifies. 

If unity which is the life-giving principle of every 
organism could be spatially represented, or in other 
words, if it were something material, it would be one 
of those very limbs that have to be unified, and could 
not then be the unifying principle itself. Hence the 
vanity of the efforts on the part of materialistic physi- 
ologists who obstinately strive to explain life by ob- 
serving the parts which compose the organic mass, by 
studying the concurrence of their processes, their chem- 
ical relationships, and their mechanism. A material 
being, organically constituted, is something more than 
a material thing pure and simple: it announces already 
a higher principle ; it presages the spirit. 

But the things that we all agree to regard as spiritual 
defy absolutely every attempt at division. A poem 
may be considered in a certain way as material, and 
may accordingly be divided into various parts, — 
stanzas, lines, words. But it is clear that such 
a separation cannot have the value which we assign to 
the divisions of things material. For in their case every 
part can stand by itself, and is in no way deprived of 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 97 

its characteristic being; whereas every part of a poem, 
stanza, verse, word, calls out and responds to every 
other part; and if isolated from them, loses the mean- 
ing which it had in the context; or rather it loses every 
meaning, and consequently perishes. It is true that by 
conjectures we interpret even very small fragments of 
ancient poems. But we do so only in so far as we 
claim the possibility of restoring approximately the 
entire poem in which the given fragment may live, by 
which it may be restored to life. Likewise all the words 
lined up in dictionaries are as so many bleeding limbs 
of living discourses, to which they must somehow or 
other be ideally reconnected, if we are to understand 
what they really were and what functions they had. 
Multiplicity of parts in things of the spirit is only ap- 
parent: it must be reduced to indivisible unity, from 
which every element of the multiplicity derives its 
origin, its substance, and its life, so that we may give 
to it a real meaning and a foundation. 

Nor is this the only unity possessed by the things 
that are assumed to be spiritual. We have already con- 
sidered the unity whereby, for example, the words of 
a poem cannot be separated from the poem itself, in 
which each of them acquires a particular accent, a par- 
ticular expression, and therefore a particular individ- 
uality. We shall now consider another unity. He who 
really perceives a poem is not confronted by an ob- 
servable thing, compact if you will, unseverable and 



98 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

united, but none the less independent of human per- 
sonality. Poetry is only understood when in the flow- 
ing unity of its verses and in the continuous rhythm 
of its words we grasp a sentiment in its development, 
a soul's throb in a moment of its life, a man, a person- 
ality. The poetry of Dante is very different from that 
of Petrarch, because each is the expression of a power- 
fully distinct personality. Any composition of these 
poets is understood and enjoyed only when we feel in 
it the personal accent which distinguishes one poetical 
personality from the other. A poet without individ- 
uality has no significance whatsoever, and therefore 
no existence as a poet. But the real artist leaves his 
imprint more or less markedly in all his productions, 
so that in every given instance, over and beyond the 
variety of the subject matter, we feel the living soul 
of the poet. A poem then is the poet; it is a person 
and not a thing. And the same can be said, as we can 
easily see, of all things that are commonly called 
spiritual. 

But in addition to things material, it seems that there 
are immaterial ones which do not pertain as one's own 
to any particular person. The ideas of which we had 
occasion to speak before, — immaterial entities, not per- 
ceptible by the senses, but thinkable by the intellect, 
and which severally correspond to all sorts or species 
of the various material things, — were once conceived 
as things by philosophers, and they are still so con- 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 99 

ceived to-day by the majority of men. It is not requi- 
site that one actually think them; it is sufficient that 
they be in themselves thinkable. As a matter of fact, 
they may or may not be thought, no differently there- 
fore from any of the material objects which are not 
created by our senses, but must already exist in order 
that our senses may perceive them. These ideas are 
many, in a manner corresponding to the material ob- 
jects; and they are all different. They mirror, so to 
speak, the multiplicity of material things in whose sem- 
blance and likeness they were devised. There are 
horses in nature, and there is the idea of the horse by 
which we are able to recognise all the animals that be- 
long to that species. There are dogs, and there is the 
dog which we rediscover in every one of them. And 
there are flowers and the flower; and pinks, roses, and 
lilies, as well as the pink, the rose, and the lily; and 
likewise iron, copper, silver, gold, lime, water, and so 
on, to infinity. It is impossible to set a limit to ideas, 
because it is not possible ever to stop dividing, distin- 
guishing, subdividing that nature which unfolds itself 
throughout space. 

This boundless multitude of ideas, through which 
our mind can rove, surely has no spatial extension. But 
because of the necessity of conceiving any multitude as 
existing in some kind of space, it was thought proper 
to posit an ideal space in addition to the physical one. 
In other words, metaphorical dimensions were added to 



loo THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

dimensions properly so called. But whether spatially 
or not, we strive to conceive ideas as many, each one 
of them existing by itself, and susceptible of being 
thought independently of the others. In reality how- 
ever we never succeed in thinking them except as bound 
together and forming a system, in such a way that no 
single one of them can be thought except by thinking 
the others with it. Take man as an instance: each 
one of us has intuitively the idea of man, but this idea 
is not possessed like a word of which we may not even 
know the meaning. In thinking the idea we must think 
something which is its content. If we know what man 
is, we must be able to attribute a content to the idea 
of man. We may say, as the ancients did, that man 
is the laughing animal, or the speaking animal, because 
he is the only animal capable of expressing the emo- 
tions of his soul by laughter or by the inflection of his 
voice; because, in other words, he is the only animal 
who is conscious of what goes on within him. Or per- 
haps we might say that man is the reasoning animal, 
and we think this idea when we have thought the idea 
of animal and the idea of reason. But can the idea of 
animal be thought by itself alone? It, as well as the 
idea of reason, must have a content; that is, each must 
be connected with other ideas, without which it would 
be deprived of all consistency. 

And so the mind that begins to think one single idea 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE loi 

is compelled, almost dragged, to pass on to another, 
then to a third, and so on indefinitely. It finds itself in 
the condition of the man who tried to grasp a single link 
of a chain, just one, and found that he could not have it 
except on condition of taking the whole chain. So it 
is with ideas. We may not be capable of encompassing 
all of them in one single thought; but whenever we try 
to fix any one of them in our mind, it presents itself to 
us as a knot in which many other ideas are interlaced, 
twisted, and entangled. They form an infinite chain, 
in which it is not possible to think the first link or the 
last one, because the beginning is welded to the end, 
and we turn and turn and never reach the last. Is not 
this the nature of the ideas as we see them, as they con- 
stitute the field from which we must harvest all our 
possible thoughts? 

Ideas are not, therefore, a true multiplicity, because 
they are not things, either material or ideal, and be- 
cause they do not occupy any space whatsoever. 
Our imagination may present them to us as so 
many lights of an ideal sky; but our intelligence warns 
us that they cannot be separated one from the other 
and placed side by side. As I have already said : when 
we think one, we think them all. Or in any event we 
should, if we had mastered all that there is to be known. 
So that to our thought ideas appear as constituting one 
unique whole, a unity, that something which we call 



102 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

science, truth, knowledge. They are not a multitude, 
for the simple reason that in multiplicity they would be 
unthinkable. Their connection with and participation 
in an absolute unity come from the fact that they are 
the object of thought, and are therefore submitted to its 
activity, whereby they are ordered, correlated, organ- 
ised, unified. In order that we may say that one idea 
contains another, or many others, we must analyse this 
first idea and define it. This first idea must be distin- 
guished from the others, and they likewise among them- 
selves. It is not therefore sufficient to say that there 
are these ideas, motionless, inert, lifeless, as they neces- 
sarily would be if they existed per se, as objects of 
mere possible contemplation. There must also be some 
one to analyse them, define them, and distinguish them. 
It is not enough to have the material of thought, we 
need thought also to mould and fashion this material, 
turn it effectively into thought stuff, reduce it to some- 
thing susceptible of being thought. Ideas as things 
would in no way be related among themselves. 
But they do have that relationship which is generated 
by thought as it thinks them. Thought generates 
this relationship not as a fixed one, as would be the 
case if it were inherent in the things themselves; 
but as a relationship which is being formed by de- 
grees, and which is continuously changing and develop- 
ing. No ideal, abiding science, existing only as 
the object of a vague phantasy, can therefore 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 103 

result from this relationship. It constitutes instead a 
science which is ever re-formed and is never formed; 
it gives to the ideas an ever renewed aspect: it matures 
them, elaborates them, perfects them, by concentrating 
on each one of them the constantly increasing light of 
the system into which it closely binds them. 

Ideas, then, as we really think them, are not a 
minutely fractioned and scattered multiplicity. Nor 
are they a mass of concurrent elements. They are 
Thought as it becomes articulate, and gains distinctness 
by these many Limbs, by these ideas, which exist, all 
of them, in the process by which they are gradually 
formed, developed, and complicated, and arrayed in an 
order which is constantly being renewed and which is 
never definitely perfected. 

There are not then many ideas; there is one Idea, 
which is Thought. Only in a metaphorical sense can 
we consider them as things; and, properly speaking, 
they are the human person itself as actualised in 
thought, which is busily occupied in the construction of 
knowledge. They are an indivisible unity, in which 
each idea is found collaborating with every other one so 
as to answer the questions which Thought constantly 
propounds. They are the human person, not the per- 
sons; for we have already concluded that only in an 
abstract sense is it possible to speak of many persons; 
concretely there is but one universal Person which 
is not multiplicable. 



I04 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

There are not, then, going back to our original di- 
vision, persons and things, material and spiritual. At 
the most there is one person, Man, and there are the 
material things which constitute this nature, as it oc- 
cupies space, and in which we too believe we have a 
place, in as much as we consider ourselves beings of 
nature. Nothing beyond this can be conceived: on one 
side a sole immultiplicable reality, on the other a mani- 
fold reality, indefinitely divisible. 

Here we might perhaps stop considering the special 
interest that called forth this inquiry. For no one 
could possibly suppose for a moment that culture could 
be placed in the midst of material things rather than 
in the spiritual reality which is a person. However, 
since the intimate nature of this spiritual reality which 
we call culture is not yet clearly revealed, we must 
continue our investigations, and give more attention to 
this division which for a moment we thought might be 
final. I mean the division of the world into persons and 
things: the equipoise of spirit and matter. 

Do we really think this matter as we say we do, and 
which we believe we are justified in opposing to the 
spirit, in as much as the spirit is unity or universality, 
and matter, in its entirety, in every one of its parts, in 
everything, is an indefinite multiplicity? Matter can 
in truth be thought only on condition that it be possible 
to think multiplicity, that pure multiplicity which is the 
characteristic quality of matter. 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 105 

What then is the meaning of multiplicity? In abso- 
lute terms we call multiple that which consists of ele- 
ments each one of which is quite independent of all the 
others, and absolutely devoid of any and every relation- 
ship with them. The materialist conceived the world 
as an aggregate of atoms, separated one from the other 
and having no reciprocal relevance of any sort what- 
soever. In the world of pure quantity, which is the 
same as absolute multiplicity, mathematical science 
claims the knowledge of units indifferent to their 
nexus, and therefore susceptible of being united and 
separated, of being summed up and divided, without 
any alteration taking place within the individual unit 
itself. Numerical units are therefore pre-eminently 
irrelative. 

But the concept itself of the multiplicity of irrelative 
elements is an absurd one. In order that we may con- 
ceive many unrelated elements we must, to start with, 
be able to conceive a couple of such elements. Let us 
take A and B, absolutely unrelated, and such that the 
concept of one will contain nothing of the other's, and 
will therefore exclude it from itself. If A did not so 
exclude B, something of B would be found in A, and 
we could no longer speak of the two elements as irrela- 
tive. Irrelativity means reciprocal exclusion, a capac- 
ity by which each term is opposed to the other, and 
prevents the other from having anything in common 
with it. Without this reciprocal action whereby each 



io6 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

term turns to the other and excludes it from itself, 
establishing itself as a negation of it, there would be 
no irrelativity. But this action by which each term is 
referred to the other so as to deny it, what is it but 
a relationship? Every effort therefore tending to break 
up reality into parts completely repugnant amongst 
themselves, mutually excluding one another, and there- 
fore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very oppo- 
site of what was intended, viz.: the relative in place 
of the irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity. 

Neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable with- 
out that unity whereby the two engender that whole in 
which the two units are connected, even though they 
mutually exclude one another: without that unity which 
fuses and unifies every multiplicity determined in a 
number, which correlates among themselves the units 
which constitute the number. We could strip multi- 
plicity of all unity only by not thinking it. But then 
in the gloom of what is not thought, multiplicity truly 
enough would not be unity, but it would not even 
be multiplicity, because it could not be anything at 
all. Or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely unthink- 
able. 

Thought then establishes relationships among the 
units of the multiple, and thus constitutes them as the 
units of the manifold, and as forming multiplicity. 
It adds and divides, composes and decomposes, 
and variously distributes, materialising and dematerial- 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 107 

ising, so to speak, the reality which it thinks. For it 
materiahses the reahty when it conceives it as mani- 
fold: but it can conceive it as such only by unifying it, 
and therefore by dematerialising it and reabsorbing it 
into its own spiritual substance. 

Matter is a manifold reality, without unity. What it 
is we already have seen: a material reality, and as such 
divisible into parts, placed in the world in the midst of 
a congeneric multitude. Now, since pure multiplicity 
is not conceivable except on condition that we abstract 
from that relationship to which the reciprocal exclu- 
siveness of manifold elements is reduced, it is evident 
that matter and things are abstract entities. Thought 
stops to consider them, and regards them as existent, 
only because it withdraws the attention from that part 
of itself which it contributes to the making of the ob- 
ject represented. Thought therefore prescinds from 
that unity which material things could not by them- 
selves contain, but from which it is impossible to pre- 
scind absolutely unless we wish to be reduced to an ab- 
surd conception. 

Objective things then, the world of matter itself 
which we are wont to oppose in equipoise to the person, 
are in truth not separable from it. For matter has its 
foundation in thought by which the personality is ac- 
tualised. Things are what we in our own thought 
counterpose to ourselves who think them. Outside of 
our thought they are absolutely nothing. Their ma- 



io8 THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 

terial hardness itself has to be lent to them by us, 
for it ultimately is to be resolved into multiplicity, and 
multiplicity implies spiritual unity. 

This then is the world: an infinity of things all of 
which have however their root in us. Not in "us" as 
we are represented ordinarily in the midst of things; 
not in the empirical and abstract "us" which feeds the 
vanity of the empty-headed egoist, of him who has not 
the faintest notion of what he really is, who can there- 
fore think of himself only as enclosed within the tight 
husk of his own flesh and of his particular passions. 
No! they are rooted in that true "us" by which we 
think, and agree in one same thought, while thinking all 
things, including ourselves as opposed to things. And 
he who fails to reach this profound source, this root 
from which all reality receives its vitalising sap, may 
indeed get a blurred glimpse of a blind, inert, material 
mechanism, but he cannot even fix and determine this 
mechanism. He cannot upon further reflection stop at 
the conviction that it is in truth, as it appears in sem- 
blance, something real, for it reveals itself to him as so 
absurd as to become unthinkable. The world then is 
in us; it is our world, and it lives in the spirit. It lives 
the very life of that person which we strive to realise, 
sometimes satisfied with our work, but oftener unsatis- 
fied and restless. And there is the life of culture. 

It is not possible to conceive knowledge otherwise 
than as living knowledge, and as the extolment of our 



THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 109 

own personality. This is our conclusion. We shall, 
later on, derive from it two corollaries that are very 
important for teachers, in as much as they bear di- 
rectly on the problems of education. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

From the concept of the spirituality of culture, we de- 
rive all the fundamental propositions of pedagogy. But 
in as much as this conception of culture coincides with 
that of personality, or of the spirit, it is evident that all 
the fundamental propositions of the philosophy of the 
spirit are also derived from it. In fact, we separate 
pedagogy from the philosophy of the spirit only because 
of didactic convenience. To determine, then, the attri- 
butes of culture, by which education becomes actual, 
we have but to consider the nature of the spirit and 
endeavour to define its attributes. This way we must 
follow if we are ever to acquire a thorough comprehen- 
sion of the principles of the several theories of educa- 
tion, principles which are but the laws immanent to the 
life of education itself in its effective development. 

The assertion that "culture is the human spirit" 
means nothing unless we first define this spirit and 
understand its attributes. We cannot possess a concept 
which is not determined; and the determinations of a 
concept are the constituent attributes of the reality 
which we strive to conceive, and which is not thinkable 

if deprived of any of these attributes. The following 

110 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE in 

example, appropriate even though trite, will make my 
meaning clearer. Physical bodies cannot be conceived 
without also conceiving gravity. Gravity is then an 
attribute of the physical body, and as such it determines 
the concept of it. In the same way, to conceive the 
spirit is to embrace with thought the concepts which 
are absolutely inseparable from the concept of the 
spirit. 

This inquiry into the nature of the attributes of 
culture, though it constantly progresses towards a sat- 
isfactory solution, yet seems at times to be losing 
ground on account of the ever-increasing difficulties 
that beset its advance. It is true, no doubt, that human 
thought, driven by the irresistible desire to know it- 
self, has made some headway towards mastering the 
concept of itself. Philosophy has indeed progressed, 
and the modern world can proudly point to truths un- 
suspected by the thinkers of antiquity. But the assidu- 
ous and prolonged toil of thought engaged in this task 
has at all moments disclosed new difficulties; it has 
ever been busy sketching new concepts which subse- 
quently prove immature and in need of further elabora- 
tion, and has been pushing its investigations to such 
depths as to make it difficult to follow its lead without 
sometimes going astray, without frequently stopping in 
utter weariness at the roadside. 

Men talk learnedly nowadays of the human spirit, 
but with a doctrine which is often insufficient or, as 



112 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

we say, not up to date. They have stopped at one of 
those wayside concepts where thought no doubt passed 
and temporarily halted, but from which it moved on 
towards a more distant goal. For while this long his- 
tory of the endeavours by which man struggles onward 
towards the understanding of his own nature is the basis 
on which modern philosophy builds its firm concept of 
the spirit, yet for those who have not attained the van- 
tage ground of this modern philosophy, this history is 
unfortunately a very intricate maze; it is the bewil- 
dering 

"selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte" ^ 

from which it is difficult ever to issue. And therefore 
it is much easier, as Dante once remarked, to teach 
those who are completely ignorant than those who have 
a smattering of philosophy. But to-day culture is so 
intimately connected with philosophical speculation 
that the greater part of educated men profess this or 
that system without being aware of it. And when such 
men do take up the study of philosophy per se, they 
no longer possess the mental ingenuousness, the specu- 
lative candour, which would enable them to grasp the 
obvious, evident, incontrovertible truth of the most 
profound philosophical proposition. 

This inquiry then is difficult. It demands either a 
long, methodic, laborious study of the history of phi- 

' "Forest savage, rough, and stern." — Dante, Inferno, 1.5. 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 113 

losophy conducted with critical vigour, or that unyield- 
ing tenacity of the mind which is the surest sign of 
sound spiritual' character; that steadfast firmness by 
which man, once in possession of a clearly irrefutable, 
truly fundamental truth, rigorously excludes from his 
soul all the allurements of prejudice, all convictions for- 
merly entertained, even though extremely plausible, if 
they contradict his Truth. For he trusts that these 
perplexities, these difficulties which he is not now in 
condition to explain, will be removed in virtue of that 
very thought to which he has confidently committed 
himself. 

This unflinching resolve is the courage of the phi- 
losopher, who has never feared to brave common sense, 
and single-handed to marshal against the multitude the 
array of his seemingly absurd assertions, which 
however, in the progress of their reciprocal integrations, 
have subsequently contributed to redeem this very mul- 
titude from error, — from that error which is intellectual 
misery, social wretchedness, economic, political, and 
moral destitution. Because of this inflexible firmness 
the philosopher has never dreaded that boundless soli- 
tude, that thin atmosphere to which he is uplifted by 
thought, and where at first he has the sensation of faint- 
ing away into the rarefied air. 

We must then muster up courage and relinquish all 
the ideas which we once accepted, even though they 
still tempt us with superficial glitterings of truth, when 



114 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

once they have proved themselves to be in contradiction 
with experience. For I too hold experience to be the 
touchstone of all our thoughts, philosophy not excluded. 
But I insist that we be careful lest we confound the 
mockery of the first puppet that dupes our imagination 
with genuine experience ; that in as much as every man 
speaks of experience in exclusive accordance with what- 
ever concept he has been able to form of it, we too de- 
termine beforehand what our conception of it is. Now 
I say that no concept of experience can be validly en- 
tertained which does not take into account that truth 
which presents itself to us as truly fundamental and 
therefore to be used as an indispensable basis for all 
subsequent conceptual constructions. 

Such fundamental truth we have previously attained 
when we established that "We" are not what we seem 
to be in the dim empirical representation of our per- 
sonality, a thing among things. Our "Self" is the 
deeper one by means of which we see all things in 
whose midst our other self too is discernible. The real- 
ity of this, our deeper "self" which cannot be conceived 
as a thing, without which nothing can be conceived, in 
the same way that the trunk, the branches, and the 
boughs are not possible without the root from which 
the tree issues, is a truth which we may never grasp, 
but if we do, we shall forever be compelled to see in it 
the source of all other possible truths, including the 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 115 

concept of experience. For once we have securely mas- 
tered it, we will be convinced that it is impossible to 
conceive whatever is considered and thought of as 
constituting this world otherwise than as this world 
which we see, which we touch, and which, in short, we 
look upon as the contents of our experience: and that 
it is also impossible to conceive this experience without 
referring it to us who have it not as an object of pos- 
session but as an activity which we exercise. So that 
nothing, absolutely nothing, can be thought when the 
relationship between things and experience, and again 
the rapport between experience and ourselves is ob- 
tained, without thinking the deep reality of this our 
"self." We may again close our eyes to this reality 
or hold it in abeyance, but we can do so only after 
we have effaced every notion of the two relationships 
just mentioned, and when we again have im- 
mersed ourselves in the mystery of things, in the gloom 
of their apparent independent existence, of their ever 
self-defeating multiplicity. 

Against this reality of the profound "us" which is 
the genuine spiritual reality, there are innumerable and 
awe-inspiring difficulties. They are difficulties that so 
violently oppress our minds and our hearts as to dismay 
us, and almost force us to give up this concept of a 
reality on which all other realities depend, and which 
cannot but be one alone, and infinite, and really uni- 



ii6 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

versal.'^ Alone, because in it all opposites must coin- 
cide: the good and the evil, what is true and what is 
false, life and death, peace and war, pleasure and pain, 
yours and mine, — all things, in short, that we have been 
obliged to sunder and distinguish in order to take our 
bearings and meet the exigencies of life. Formidable 
difficulties indeed ! And they are the problems of phi- 
losophy. It would be childish and senseless to dispose 
of them by ignoring that concept from which they de- 
rive. It is the philosopher's task, it is the strict duty 
of human thought to face the problems as they rise out 
of the positions which it has captured in its onward 
march. For to yield ground, to turn the back to a truth 
which has been demonstrated to be indispensable, that 
is impossible. 

Those who wish to orient themselves in the world 
to-day must, before all, cling to this: that the basis of 
every thinkable reality is our spiritual reality, one, in- 
finite, universal, — the reality which unites us all in one 



* Many speak of the universal and say that they conceive this 
universal as concrete and immanent. Few, however, eflfectively 
fix their thought on that universality which alone is such, which 
alone can be such, which has nothing outside of itself, not even 
the particular, and which is ideal on condition that the idea to 
which it belongs be reality itself in all its determinateness. And 
so in speaking of "universal" and of "individual" we must re- 
member that the latter cannot be anything without being the 
former, since indeed the universal is not a merely abstract idea, 
but reality, the reality of thought. Therefore I have here used 
the expression "really universal". — G. G. 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 117 

sole spiritual life; the reality in which teacher and 
pupils meet when by their reciprocal comprehensions 
they constitute a real school. 

What then is this one, infinite, universal reality? Is 
this question truly unanswerable as it seems to be, as 
it has often in the past been declared to be? For, it 
has been argued, in order to give an answer, whether 
here or elsewhere, we must somehow think the reality 
to which the answer is referred. We must think it and 
therefore distinguish it from all the others, and so pre- 
suppose it as one existing among many and as forming 
with them a multiplicity; and this is the very opposite 
of that reality which we are striving to think. Or, in 
other words, when we try to say what the subject is, 
we must, somehow, set it as the object, and thus con- 
vert it into what is the opposite of the subject. Or 
again: the subject cannot think itself, because if it 
did, it would split into the duality of itself as thinking 
and itself as thought, and what is thinking is not what 
is thought. But all these objections together with many 
others of the same force that are ordinarily raised 
against radical idealism have but one single defect; 
which is such, however, as to make it hopeless for the 
idealist ever to succeed in being understood by those 
that resort to this kind of argument. These opponents, 
strangely enough, miss the most elementary meaning 
of the terms with which they claim to be familiar. 
They fail to see that when the idealist says "subject," 



ii8 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

he cannot possibly mean by it one abstract term of the 
relationship subject-object, which, because of this very 
abstractness, is devoid of all consistency. The ego is 
called "subject," because it contains within itself an 
object which is not diverse but identical with it. As 
a pure subject it is already a relationship; it is self- 
affirmation and therefore affirmation of an object, but 
of an object, be it remembered, in which the subject 
is not alienated from itself; by which, rather, it truly 
returns to itself, embraces itself, and thus originatively 
realises itself. In order to be /, I must know myself, 
I must set my own self in front of myself. Only thus 
I am I, a personality, and "subject," the centre of my 
world or of my thought. For if I should not objectify 
myself to myself, if in the endeavour to free myself com- 
pletely from all objectivity, I were to retreat into the 
first term, — a purely abstract one, — of this relationship 
by which I posit myself, I should remain on the hither 
side of this relationship, that is of that very reality in 
which I am to realise myself. So then by this inner ob- 
jectification the subject does not at all depart from 
itself. It rather enters into its own subjectivity, and 
constitutes it. Surely man may. Narcissus-like, make 
an idol of his own self: he may worship himself in a 
fixed semblance already determined and crystallised. 
But in so doing, he materialises himself, makes his per- 
son into a thing, looks away from his true spiritual life, 
misses self-consciousness, averts his thought from his 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 119 

own intimate being. This self-conversion from person 
into thing takes place, not when we think of ourselves, 
but rather when we fail to do so. 

Philosophy then, as the thinking of the Spirit in its 
absolute subjectivity, is the Spirit's own life. For the 
spirit lives by constituting itself as the ego, and it does 
this by thinking itself, by acquiring consciousness of 
itself. And while philosophising then, we cannot but 
ask what is this one infinite universal reality which is 
our Self and is called the spirit. We cannot dispense 
with this inquiry into the attributes of the spirit, which 
is at the same time the inquiry into the attributes of 
culture. 

The examination of the possibility of this investiga- 
tion has carried us, without our being aware of it, into 
the very midst of the inquiry itself. For what we con- 
sidered as an elementary meaning of the word 
"spirit," the ego, which is not something in unrelated 
immediacy, but which constitutes itself, posits itself, 
realises itself in that it thinks itself and becomes self- 
consciousness, — this is also the ultimate characteristic 
which can be assigned to the spirit, or to man himself, 
that is, to what in man is essentially human. If we 
examine all the other differences that have been 
assigned or could be found by which the spirit is 
distinguishable from things, we shall find, after due 
reflection, that they all cease to have a real meaning 
as soon as we neglect the most profound characteristic 



I20 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

of spiritual reality, viz., that this reality is generated 
by virtue of consciousness. Every form of reality 
other than spiritual, not only is presented to thought 
as not conditioned by consciousness, but seems to 
afford no possibility of being thought (in relation to 
consciousness) otherwise than as conditioning this very 
consciousness. And when we say of the spiritual being 
that it does not know what it is, that it is not acquainted 
with itself, that it therefore remains concealed from 
itself, we conceive then its spiritual being in a manner 
analogous to that by which we conceive material or bod- 
ily being, — externally visible, but internally unknown. 
And we say that the individual fails to grasp his own 
moral nature, because in fact we make this moral be- 
ing into something natural, similar to that which is at- 
tributed to each one of the things that the spirit sets in 
opposition to itself. 

But the spirit has no nature of its own, no destiny to 
direct its course, no predetermined inevitable lot. It 
has no fixed qualities, no set mode of being, such as 
constitute, from the birth to the death of an individual, 
the species to which it belongs, to whose law it is com- 
pelled by nature to submit, whose tyrannical limits and 
bounds he can never trespass. The spirit, we have 
seen, cannot but be conceived as free, and its freedom is 
this privileged attitude to be what it wants to, — angel 
or beast, as the ancients said; good or evil, true or false, 
or, generally speaking, to be or not to be. To be or not 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 121 

to be man, — the spirit, that which he is, and which 
he would not be if he did not become. 

Man is not man by virtue of natural laws. He be- 
comes man. By man I do not mean an animal among 
animals, held to no accounting of his deeds, who comes 
into the world, grows, lives, and dies, unaware. Man 
from the time he considers himself such, and in so 
far as he considers himself such, becomes through his 
own efforts. He makes himself what he is the first 
time he opens his eyes on his inner consciousness and 
says "/," — the "I" which never would have been 
uttered, had he not been aroused from the sluggish 
torpor of natural beings (such as our phantasy repre- 
sents them) and had not started thinking under his 
own power and through his own determination. 

This freedom which is man's prerogative offers 
merely an external view, has a very hazy consistency, 
and appears as something illusory, only because we do 
not define it exclusively as autonomous becoming or 
self-making. For in fact "becoming" is ordinarily 
understood in a way which does not admit of being 
considered as man's prerogative. Does not every liv- 
ing being become? The plant vegetates only because it 
too has an inborn potency by which it is forced from 
one stage of development to the next, from which in 
this process it acquires the mode of being which is 
peculiarly its own, which it did not have before, which 
no other being could from the outside have conferred 



122 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

upon it. And yet the plant is not a person but a thing: 
it is not spirit, but a simple object, and as such it is 
endowed with a definite nature and moved by a definite 
law, which is the very antithesis of the freedom which 
is peculiar to the spirit. 

I might without further thought say that this concep- 
tion of becoming, referred to the plant as a plant, is 
improper, that in reality the plant does not become 
for the very reason that we deny it its freedom. 
But I shall begin by stating that the becoming which 
we attribute to the spiritual reality must be specified 
and determined with greater accuracy, if we are to 
consider it as the characteristic of this reality. When 
so specified and determined, it will be found to coincide 
with the conception of freedom. Becoming, then, can 
be taken in two ways, which for brevity's sake we shall 
call the autonomous and the heteronomous. That is, 
the being which becomes may have the law of its be- 
coming either in itself or outside of itself. Becoming 
covers such cases as, for example, the filling of a vessel 
into which a liquid is poured. But this becoming takes 
place in a manner which has its law in the person that 
fills the vessel; and the filling therefore may be con- 
sidered not so much a becoming as the effect of a be- 
coming, that is, as the result of that act which is be- 
ing performed by man. An heteronomous becoming is 
to be traced back to the becoming of the cause which 
produces it. The plant vegetates, and its vegetation 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 123 

is a development, a becoming. But could it grow with- 
out the rays of the sun, the moisture of the soil? The 
plant vegetates in consequence of its nature, that nature 
which in accord with our ordinary way of considering 
plant life it possessed from the time it was a green blade 
just sprouting; nay, from the time it was a seed in the 
ground, or rather when it was as yet in the plant 
that produced the seed, or better still when it was 
in its infinitely remote origin. It is evident therefore 
that we cannot think of the law of becoming as resid- 
ing, so to speak, within a given plant. Whether we call 
it nature or name it God, this law transcends the be- 
coming of the plant, its heteronomous becoming as we 
called it, and is properly the becoming of something 
else. But the becoming of man is autonomous. If he 
becomes intelligent, that is, if he understands, he does 
so through a principle which is intrinsically his own; 
for no man can be made to comprehend what he him- 
self will not grasp. If he becomes good, his perfected 
will can in no manner whatsoever be considered as de- 
termined by an outside cause, without at the same time 
being thereby deprived of all that is characteristic of 
goodness. 

But in stating that man's becoming is autonomous 
(or true) we have simply formulated a problem with- 
out giving it a solution. What does this autono- 
mous becoming consist in? Simply to notice its ex- 
istence would never help us to understand it. Every 



124 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

fact is intelligible only as an effect of a cause. And 
a cause is a cause on condition that it be a thing 
other than the effect. In order to understand the au- 
tonomous becoming or freedom of the spirit, we must 
not consider it as a fact, that is, as something done. A 
thing made presupposes the making; and from the deed 
we must rise to the doing, but to a doing which shall 
not itself be a thing done, a fact, and similar therefore 
to the doings which we witness as mere spectators. The 
doing in which our autonomous becoming is detected is 
that one of which We are not spectators but actors, we 
the spectators of every other doing, we as the thinking 
Activity. 

This then is the becoming which rigorously may be 
called autonomous : the one which we know not as spec- 
tators but as actors, which comes forth as that reality 
which is produced by the act of knowing, and therefore 
is not known because it exists, but exists because it is 
known, — our existence. It is the existence of us who 
know, for example, that a = b, and who are such only 
in so far as we know and are conscious of knowing that 
a = b, — of us who suffer or rejoice, and who cannot 
be in this or that state except by knowing it, so that 
no cause could reduce us to such a state, unless we were 
conscious of such a cause and felt its valid application 
to us, — of us, above all, who are not ourselves unless we 
apperceive ourselves, by reflecting upon ourselves, and 
thus acquiring existence as a personality, as human self- 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 125 

consciousness, as thought. Thought in opposition to 
nature, with which it is constantly contrasted, is noth- 
ing but this self-reflection which establishes the per- 
sonality, and that reality which, absolutely, is not, but 
becomes. Every reality other than thought becomes 
relatively; and its becoming is intelligible simply as the 
effect of another becoming. Only thought, only the 
Spirit, is absolute becoming, and its becoming is its 
liberty. 

But whether it be called "freedom" or "becoming," 
the important thing is to avoid the mistake, which was 
general in the past and is still very common to-day, of 
separating this attribute of the spirit from the spirit 
itself, thus failing to understand exactly what is prop- 
erly called the attribute. For example, we say that the 
triangle is a three-sided plane figure, and we seem to be 
able to distinguish and therefore to separate logically 
the idea of triangle from the idea of three-sided plane 
figure. But a little reflection will make it evident 
that in thinking the idea of triangle, we think nothing 
unless we at least think the plane trilateral figure. So 
that we do not really have two ideas, which how- 
ever closely connected may yet be separated to be con- 
joined again: what we have is one single idea. And 
such is the agreement of the becoming and of the 
spirit, and in general of every attribute and of the 
reality to which it belongs. When we begin inquiring 
whether the spirit is free or not, we set out on an 



126 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

erroneous track which will take us into a blind alley 
with no possibility of exit. All the unsurmountable 
difficulties encountered at all times by the advocates 
of the doctrine of freedom arise in fact from the error 
of first thinking the spirit (or whatsoever that reality 
may be for which freedom is claimed) and of subse- 
quently propounding the question of its properties. 
For the spirit is jree in as much as it is nothing else 
than freedom; and the spirit ''becomes" in as much as 
it is nothing else than "becoming," and this becoming 
cannot therefore be considered as the husk enveloping 
the kernel — the spirit. There is no kernel to the spirit: 
it is in no manner comparable to a m.oving body in 
which the body itself could be distinguished from mo- 
tion, and would admit therefore of being tliought as in 
a state of rest even though rest is considered impossible. 
The spirit, continuing our simile and correcting it, is 
motion without a mass, — a motion surely that cannot 
be represented to our imagination, for the very reason 
that motion is peculiar to the body and does not belong 
to the spirit; and imagination is the thought of bodies, 
and not of the thought which thinks the bodies. This 
idea of motion without a mass^ baffling as it is to our 
imagination, is perhaps the most effective warning that 
can be given to those who wish to fix in their minds the 
exact concept of the nature of the spirit. In order to 
avoid new terminology not sufficiently intelligible and 
therefore unpractical, we may resort to material ex- 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 127 

pressions, and speak of the nature of the spirit as of a 
"thing" which becomes, and use such words as "ker- 
nel" and "husk." But we must never lose sight of 
the fact that this manner of speaking, which is appro- 
priate for things, is not suitable for the spirit, and can 
be resorted to only with the understanding that the 
spirit is not a thing, and that therefore its whole being 
consists solely in its becoming. 

We are now in a position to understand the meaning 
of the spirituality of culture, that is, of the reduction 
of culture to the human personality obtained in the 
preceding chapter, as well as the pedagogical interest 
of this reduction. Culture, as the entire content of 
education, because it must be sought within the per- 
sonality, and because it resolves itself into the life of 
the spirit, is not a thing, and does not admit of being 
conceived statically either in books or in the mind: 
not before nor after it is apprehended. It does not 
exist in libraries or in schools^ or in us before we go 
to school, or while we still remain within its walls, or 
after our nourished minds have taken leave of it. It 
is in no place, at no time, in no person. Culture is not, 
because if it were, it would have to be some "thing," 
whereas by definition it is the negation of that which 
is capable of being anything whatever. It is culture 
in so far as it becomes. Culture exists as it develops, 
and in no other manner. It is always in the course of 
being formed, it lives. 



128 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

But to understand this life, and in order to grasp 
more firmly this "idea" of culture which is a spiritual 
banner to rally educators, I must again bring up a 
certain distinction. Culture, I said, lives (that is, it 
is culture) when it is endowed with a life that is en- 
tirely different from the life which biologically ani- 
mates all living beings, ourselves included. The 
difference can be stated as follows: in the case of every 
other life, we can assert its existence in so far as we 
have knowledge of it either directly or indirectly. It 
is always, however, different from us and from our 
knowing it; so much so that the possibilities of going 
astray are very great. But for the life of culture, which 
is the life of our spirit, we have no need of being 
informed by the experience of others, or even of our- 
selves. We live it. It is our very thought, — this 
thought which may indeed err in respect to what is 
different from itself, as not tallying with it; but which 
cannot possibly deceive us in regard to itself, since 
it is unable not to be itself. The life of culture is 
not a spectacle but an activity. Nor is it activity 
for some and a spectacle for others. Culture is never 
a show for any one. No person can ever know for 
his fellow being. What, for me, Aristotle knows, is 
what I know of Aristotle. 

Culture, — this untiring activity which never for a 
moment turns into a spectacle for any of us, which 
ever therefore demands effort and toil, — could not 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 129 

avoid becoming a show and being made up into a 
"thing," could not escape the danger of dying as cul- 
ture by degenerating into something anti-spiritual, fruit- 
less, and material, if, while yet being activity, it were 
not at the same time in some way a spectacle to itself. 
This point demands careful consideration It is not 
sufficient to say that culture, that thought is life, 
and not the thought of life. We will not attain the 
conception of culture by merely contrasting, as we 
have done, our life, the life we lead as actors, with 
the life of others which we behold as spectators, or by 
opposing the life of ourselves as thinking beings to the 
life we possess as organic beings, to the life of our 
senses by which we are on a par with the other animals. 
The life of thought, in its peculiar inwardness and sub- 
jectivity, is still conceived to-day by powerful thinkers, 
by analogy with life in a biological sense, as irreflective 
and instinctive, or, as they say, as simple intuition. 
But thought which though living is irreflective becomes 
indeed an active performance, a drama without spec- 
tators, but it also remains as a drama represented for 
spectators who are absent, and who should be informed 
of those things which direct experience had not placed 
before their eyes. And it is difficult to surmise who 
would impart to them this information if the house 
were empty. 

In other words, I mean to say that this would-be 
intuitive life of thought, fading away into the subcon- 



I30 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

scious, melting into the naturality of the unconscious, 
is, like every form of natural life effectually a stranger 
to thought (that is conceived as a stranger to thought), 
an object and nothing more than an object of thought, 
and therefore incapable of ever being a subject, of 
ever having value as subject, that is, as thought itself. 
For that reason we can never effectively think it; for 
never can we truly think any thing which is natural 
and thought of as natural. Who can say what the life 
of the plant is? To posit nature by thought is to 
posit something irreducible to thought and therefore 
unthinkable. This perhaps would not necessarily be 
a serious drawback for the life itself of thought if we 
lived it. For would it not be sufficient to live it? 
Why insist on thinking its life? Why demand a head, 
so to speak, as a hood for the head? But there is 
a drawback, and a serious one, as a result of the 
fact that this life itself of thought does not now, never 
will in the future, come before us as that irreflective 
life which it is claimed to be: it comes to us as a philos- 
ophy which recommends it and advocates it as the 
only possible life of thought. In fact, in order to be 
able to speak of this life, we must first think it. But 
how could we think it, if the only possible life was that 
one which we intend to think, and not the one with 
which we think this irreflective life? 

So then, in order that this life of ours (truly, inti- 
mately, spiritually ours) may not be confounded with 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 131 

the life of natural things, with that pseudo-life which 
is only an apparent becoming, an effect of another 
becoming by which it is transcended, it is not sufficient, 
as I started out to say, to call it a drama and not a 
spectacle. As a result of more careful determinations 
we may now say that it is not another man's spectacle, 
but our drama which is at the same time our spectacle 
too. In it the actors play to themselves. It is self- 
conscious activity. It is activity perpetually watching 
over itself. 

And again : Just as the becoming of the spirit would 
cease to be that one sole becoming which it actually is, 
were we to distinguish the spirit from its becoming, so 
the consciousness of spiritual activity would also be- 
come unintelligible if we were to distinguish, as philos- 
ophers insistently do, between activity and aware- 
ness, between the performance and the show. The 
distinction here too arises from referring to the spirit, 
the mode of thinking which is suited for the thinking 
of things. In the sphere of things, doing is one thing, 
watching the thing as it is done is another. But to 
us the spirit's becoming has shown itself to be the 
very negation of this distinction between actor and 
spectacle, so that in saying that the actor is his own 
spectator we cannot introduce, within the unity in 
which we had taken refuge, the dualism which is ex- 
cluded from the concept of the spirit. I have spoken 
of "motion without mass," turning a deaf ear to the 



/ 



132 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

claims of our imagination. Now I shall add some- 
thing that clashes even more violently against the 
laws which govern our image-making; and I shall do 
so in order to make it very clear that the spirit does 
not live in the world of things which is swept over 
by our imagination. I shall now call the spirit a gazing 
motion. The spirit's acting — its eternal process, its 
immanent becoming — is not an escort to thinking, but 
the very thinking itself, which is neither cause nor 
effect: neither the antecedent nor the consequent, nor 
yet the concomitant of the action by which the spirit 
goes on constantly impersonating itself. It is this 
very acting. 

In accordance with the popular point of view which, 
as I have said, is shared by great philosophers, a dis- 
tinction is made between the spirit considered as will 
and the spirit regarded as intellect, or as conscious- 
ness, or as thought, or whatever term may be used 
to indicate the becoming aware of this spiritual activ- 
ity. But if the spirit in that it wills did not also think, 
we should be thrust back to the position which we have 
shown above to be untenable, and be forced to admit 
that the irreflective life of the spirit cannot be fused 
with the reflective life, and is therefore unaccountable 
and unthinkable. The will which qua will is not also 
thought, is in respect to thought which knows it a 
simple object, a spectacle and not a drama. It is 
nature and not spirit. And a thought which qua 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 133 

thought is not will, is, in respect to the will which 
integrates it, a spectator without a spectacle. If there 
is to be a drama, and a drama which is the spirit, it is 
inevitable that the will be the thought, and that the 
thought be the will, over and beyond that distinction 
which serves if anything to characterise the opposition 
between nature and spirit. 

Should we, returning to our comparison, demand of 
that motion which is spirit a moving mass; should we, 
grounded on the naive and primitive conception which 
identifies knowing with the seeing of external things, 
demand within the sphere of the spiritual activity 
itself a doing in which knowing should find its object 
all ready made, we should continue to wander helplessly 
in the maze of things, and to grope in the mystery of the 
multiplicity of things, which are many and yet are 
not many. We would be turning our eyes away from 
the lode star which is the supreme concept of the 
spirit, and thereby show ourselves incapable of rising 
to that point of view which is the peculiar one of 
culture. 

Culture, as the spirit's life, which is a drama and 
self -awareness, is not simply effort and uneasy toil, 
it is not a tormenting restlessness which we may some- 
times shake off, from which we would gladly be res- 
cued. Nor is it a feverish excitement that consumes 
our life-blood and tosses us restlessly on a sick-bed. 
The spirit's life is not vexation but liberation from 



134 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

care. For the greatest of sorrows, Leopardi tells us, 
is ennui, the inert tedious weariness of those who find 
nothing to do, and pine away in a wasting repose 
which is the very antithesis of the life of the spirit. 
The negation of this life, — the obstacles, the hind- 
rances, the halts it encounters, — that is the source of 
woe. But life with its energy is joy; it is joy because 
it is activity, our activity. Another man's activity as 
the negation of our own is troublesome and exasperat- 
ing. The music which we enjoy (and we are able 
to enjoy it by being active) is our enjoyment. But 
the musical entertainment in which we have no part 
disturbs us, interferes with our work, irritates us. 
Our neighbour's joys in which for some reason we are 
unable to participate awaken envy in us, gall us, bring 
some manner of displeasure to our hearts. 

Culture, then, as life of the spirit, is effort, and work, 
but never a drudgery. It would be toilsome labour if 
the spirit had lived its life before we began to work; 
if this life had blossomed forth, and had realised itself 
without our efforts. But our effort, our work is this 
very life of the spirit, its nature, in which culture 
develops. Work is not a burdensome yoke on our 
will and on our personality. It is liberation, freedom, 
the act by which liberty asserts its being. Work may 
sometimes appear irksome because the freedom of its 
movement is checked by certain resistances which have 
to be overcome and removed. But in such cases it 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 135 

is not work which vexes us, but rather its opposite, 
sloth, against which it must combat. It follows then 
that the more intensely we occupy ourselves, the less 
heavily we are burdened by pain. For as our efforts 
redouble and the resistance is proportionately reduced, 
the spirit, which perishes in enthralment, is enabled 
to live a richer life. 

Culture then is the extolment of our being, the 
formation of our spirit, or better, its liberation and 
its beatification. As the realisation of the spirit's own 
nature, it is opposed to all suffering and is the source 
of blissfulness. But it must not be regarded as the 
fated, inevitable working out of an instinctive prin- 
ciple, or a natural law. The building of a bird's nest, 
which is the necessary antecedent to generation and 
reproduction, cannot be looked upon as work; and it 
is fruitless to try to guess whether this act is a cause 
of pleasure to the bird or a source of suffering. In- 
stinct leads the individual to self-sacrifice on behalf 
of the species. But not even this fact, vouched for 
solely by external inferences, authorises us to con- 
clude that the fulfilment of an instinctive impulse is 
actually accompanied by pain. So that it seems wiser 
to keep off this slippery surface of conjecture. It will 
be sufficient to note here that an action prompted by 
instinct, conceived as merely instinctive and thoroughly 
unconscious of the end to which it is subservient, is 
in no way to be compared with man's work. Human 



136 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

occupation is personality, will, consciousness. The 
animal does not work. But culture v/e have said is 
work. For it is liberty, self-formation, with no 
existence previous to the process; whereas the laws 
which govern the development of natural being pre- 
exist before the development itself. Culture exists 
only in so far as it is formed, and it is constituted 
solely by being developed. And what is more, as we 
shall see in the next chapter, culture does not even 
count on a pre-existing external matter ready to re- 
ceive its informing imprint. 

To conclude then: culture is (in its becoming) only 
to the extent that the cultivated man feels its worth, 
desires it, and realises it. It is a value, but not in the 
sense that man first appreciates it and subsequently 
looks for it and strives to actualise it. The value 
which man assigns to culture is that which he gradually 
goes on ascribing to Ms own culture, and whose develop- 
ment coincides with the development of his own person- 
ality. What we ought to want is exactly what we do 
want; but we want just that which we ought to. The 
ideal, not the abstract, inadequate, and false one, but 
the true ideal of our personality, is that one toward 
whose realisation we are actually working. And the 
ideal of our culture is that self -same one towards which 
our busy person remains turned in the actuality of its 
becoming. But work implies a programme, and spirit 
means "ideal;" and when we speak of culture we sig- 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 137 

nify thereby the value of culture, of a culture which 
as yet is not but which must be. Life is the life of 
the spirit as a duty, — as a life which we live, feeling 
all along that it is our duty to live it, and that it depends 
on us whether it exists or not. And culture could not 
re-enter as it does in the life of the spirit, if it too were 
not a duty, that is, if it were not this culture to whose 
development our personality is pledged. So interpreted, 
culture, far from being a destiny to which we are bound, 
is the progressive triumph of our very freedom. On 
these terms only, culture is a growth, and the spirit a 
becoming. 

This attribute, which is an ethical one, is not added 
to the attribute of Becoming any more than "becom- 
ing" was superadded to "freedom." For just as Be- 
coming develops the concept of freedom, so does the 
ethical develop and accomplish the concept of 
becoming. Freedom is never true liberty unless it is 
a process, an absolute Becoming; but Becoming can 
only be absolute by being moral. And it is therefore 
impossible to speak of learning which is not ethical. 

It has often been repeated for thousands and thou- 
sands of years that knowledge is neither good nor bad; 
that it is either true or false. But is the True a differ- 
ent category from the Good? Are they not rather one 
sole identical category? Truth could be maintained 
in a place quite distinct from the grounds of morality, 
only so long as the world clung to that conception of 



138 THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE 

truth which was the agreement of the subject with 
an assumed external object. But now by truth we 
understand the value of thought in which the subject 
becomes an object to itself and thus realises itself; 
and in clarifying this new conception of truth, we 
discover that morality is identical with it. For know- 
ing is acting, but an acting which being untrammelled 
conforms with an ideal — Duty. And in this manner 
we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and in- 
spired voice of conscience has at all times admonished 
man to worship Truth with that same intense earnest- 
ness, with those same scruples, with that identical 
personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our 
moral mission. The cult of truth is in fact what we 
otherwise call and understand to be morality, namely, 
the formation of our personality, which can be ours 
only by belonging to all men, and which, whether or 
not ours, is not immediate, not a given personality, 
but rather one which is intent on self-realisation, on 
that sacred and eternal task which is the Good. 

If we now feel culture to be free, to be a process, 
and an ethical one at that, we have succeeded in grasp- 
ing its spirituality, and we are in a position therefore 
to proceed with security on that way which opens 
before the educator's eyes, as he intently goes about 
his work of creation, or, if you so wish to call it, his 
task as a promoter of culture. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BIAS OF REALISM 

Educators of the modern school are bent on trans- 
forming its methods and institutions on the basis of the 
conception set forth in the previous chapters. The 
subtle discussions required to make this conception 
clear must have convinced the reader that this work of 
educational reform could only succeed if preceded by 
such philosophical doctrines as have recently been 
evolved in Italy and are now becoming the accepted 
faith of the newer generation. To this new belief the 
school must be converted, if it is ever going to conquer 
that freedom which has been its constant aspiration, 
and which seems to be an indispensable condition for 
its further growth. 

The faith of the modern man cleaves to a life con- 
ceived and directed idealistically. He believes that life 
— true life — is man's free creation; that in it, there- 
fore, human aims should gain an ever fuller realisation ; 
and that these aims, these ends will not be attained 
unless thought, which is man's specific force, extends 
its sway so as to embrace nature, penetrate it, and 
resolve it into its own substance. He believes that 
nature, thus turned into an instrument of thought, 

139 



I40 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

yields readily to its will, not being per se opposed or 
repugnant to the life and activity of the spirit, but 
rather homogeneous and identical with it. He be- 
lieves, moreover, that this sway can only be obtained 
by amplifying, strengthening, and constantly poten- 
tiating our human energy, which means thinking, 
knowing, self-realising; and that self-reaHsation is not 
possible unless it is free, unless it be rescued from the 
prejudice of dependence upon external principles, and 
unless it affirms itself as absolute infinite activity. 
This is the Kingdom of Man prophesied at the dawn 
of modern thought. This is the work which science, 
art, religion, not less than political revolutions and 
social reforms, have gradually been accomplishing and 
perfecting in the last three hundred years. This new 
spiritual orientation has to a certain extent influenced 
teaching; and though without a general programme 
of substantial reforms, the ideal of education has been 
transformed along idealistic lines. This transforma- 
tion, strange to say, has been effected in part by means 
of institutions which have arisen as a result of the re- 
cent development of industrial life and of the corre- 
sponding complexity in economic and social relations. 
These schools, because of their names, seem to be quite 
removed from the idealistic tendencies of modern civ- 
ilisations. Whether they be called technical, business, 
or industrial schools, they seem to be and are in fact 
the result of a realistic conception of life. But such 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 141 

realism, we must remember, is far from being opposed 
to our idealism, and should not be compared with the 
realism which we have objected to. We should rather 
consider it as the most effective demonstration of the 
idealistic trend of our times. For these institutions 
are founded on the theory that knowledge increases 
man's power in the world by enabUng him to overcome 
the obstacles by which nature^ if ignored and unknown, 
would hinder the free development of civilisation in 
general, and of those individuals in particular in whom 
and through whom civilisation becomes actual. 

Realism, on the other hand, as the opposite of the 
idealistic conception of life and culture, was shown to 
be based on a conception of reality which exists totally 
outside of human thought and of the civilisation which 
is produced by it, — of a reality existing per se in such 
a way that no end peculiar to man, no free human life, 
can be conceived which will have the power of bending 
this reality toward itself, of resolving it within itself. 
This realistic point of view is not different from the out- 
look of the primitive man who, awed by the might of 
nature, kneels submissively before its invisible power, 
which, he thinks, controls these forces. It is the ac- 
cepted belief of the naive and dreamy consciousness of 
child-Hke humanity; but it is none the less a conception 
which is opposed to the course constantly followed by 
civilisation. Its dangers must be made very clear 
and its menace removed from the path of its triumph- 



142 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

ant enemy. To overcome this realistic point of view 
in the field of education is the duty of teachers, who 
must be in a position to recognise it, and to track it 
into whatever hiding places it may lurk. I intend 
therefore in this chapter to point out some of the most 
notable realistic prejudices which, though still tolerated 
by contemporary thought, ought to be definitely 
stamped out, if we are really convinced of the spiritual 
character of culture and of its essential attributes. 

I shall here bring up again a consideration which I 
touched upon in the first chapter, — an idea which is 
the fundamental prejudice of the realistic theory of 
education in its antagonism to the profound exigencies 
of the free spiritual life which education should pro- 
mote. I mean the idea of Science (with a capital S), — 
that Science which is imagined as towering over and 
above the men who toil and suffer, think and struggle 
in quest of its light and of its force; that Science which 
would be so beautiful, and majestic, and impressive, 
were it not for the fact that it does not exist. This 
Science is looked upon as infallible, without crises, 
without reverses, without vicissitudes of doctrines, 
without parties, and without nationality, — without 
history in short; for history is full of these baser oc- 
currences; and men, without a single exception, even 
the greatest of scientists, even the lofty geniuses that 
have transformed or systematised knowledge, are all 
in some measure prone to err. The exceptions which 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 143 

are adduced to contradict this statement are so few, 
so limited by restrictions and by hair-splitting distinc- 
tions, that we can hardly allow them; especially when 
we consider that even granting the infallible oracular 
character of some men's utterances, the fact remains 
that his listeners must undergo the process of under- 
standing him, and in so doing they may go astray. So 
that from superhuman unfailing verities, we slip back 
instantly to human fallibility. Infallible Science, then, 
is not known, cannot be known to mankind; for the 
simple reason that we who constitute it are subject to 
error, and being ourselves prone to fail, we expose 
science to the same danger. If it does exist some- 
where it surely is not in this world in which we live, 
thinking, knowing, and — creating science. 

This mythical science, unsullied and incorruptible, 
segregated from all possible intercourse with thought, 
ever soaring in the pure air of divine essences, is yet the 
mother of a numerous offspring, the parent of count- 
less daughters as virginal and as infallible as the 
mother herself. These are the particular sciences, 
bearing various names, but all of them equally worthy 
of the distinction of the capital S in the eyes of their 
realistic worshippers. 

This mythology is taught in the schools which too 
often are called, and without any figurative mean- 
ing, the shrines of learning. Conceived as divinely 
superlative, as something which, though revealed his- 



144 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

torically by the successive discoveries of privileged 
minds, is none the less sharply distinct from the his- 
tory of humanity, science descends into the school. 
There it manifests itself as human knowledge, and is 
communicated to the youthful minds eager to ascend 
to the heaven of truth. And so the school comes to be 
looked upon as a kind of temple, as the Church where 
the inspired Word of the Sacred Books is read and 
explained by those who have been chosen by the 
Divinity to act as its interpreters, as preachers of the 
Faith. With this religious conception of the school 
we connect the "mission" of the educator, whose task, 
when not ridiculed and lampooned by the same scoffers 
who at all times have jeered at the teachers of divinity, 
has been surrounded by a glamour of religiosity. 
We see them encircled by that halo of distant respect 
which we naturally connect with those who, acting as 
intermediaries between us and the deity, are them- 
selves transfigured and deified. 

The school then is looked upon as a temple in which 
the pupil receives his spiritual bread. But not so the 
home which the boy must leave, that he may satisfy 
his mysteriously innate craving for knowledge. Not 
so the street, where the small boys gather, drawn to- 
gether by the irresistible need of pastime, by the 
sweet desire of frolicsome companionship, by the un- 
conscious yearning after spiritual communion with the 
world which there makes its way into the child's mind 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 145 

far off from the classroom, and lavishes upon it its own 
light, its portion of thought, its share of new experi- 
ences, and the joy of an ever renewed outpouring of 
sympathetic spirituality. 

The custodian of this temple, the schoolmaster, is 
regarded as a divine, as the minister who imparts the 
consecrated elements of Science, who leads the pupil 
to the "panem angelorum," as Dante calls it. But 
our fathers and mothers are not so regarded, — they 
who were the first custodians of a greater temple, the 
world, to whose marvels they gradually initiated our 
growing minds; they who by the use of speech taught 
us, without being aware of it, infinitely more than the 
best of schools will ever be able to teach us in the 
future; not our elder brothers to whom we always 
looked up in emulation, and from whom, even more 
than from our parents, we learned the thoughts and 
the words suited to our needs; not our grand- 
mother, who long before our eager phantasy might 
roam through the printed pages, gently led us into 
Fairyland, and there, in the enchantments of a magic 
world, disclosed to us that humanity which books and 
teachers later in life were to re-evoke for us. No! 
There are no altars to Science except in the School- 
house, and none but educators may minister to its cult. 

This mythological lore is not merely a harmless 
form of imagery, against which it might be pedantic 
to rebel. It is a real superstition, which has its roots 



146 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

deep down in the personality of the educator; it 
adheres parasitically to culture, climbs over its sturdy 
trunk, drains its sap, weakens it, deadens it. For 
when we have stripped this conception of education 
of its mythological exterior, there yet remains a clearly 
religious and realistic thought, which is professed with 
firm adhesion of the mind and complete devotion of the 
soul, as the inviolable norm of the whole activity 
which pertains to the object of this norm itself. Let 
us, for example, consider what is presupposed by the 
doctrine of methods, the so-called methodology, which is 
an important part of didactics, and a very considerable 
section in the whole field of pedagogics. The doctrine 
of methods comprises a general treatment, which cor- 
responds to what we called the Mother-Science, and 
a particular treatment for the individual sciences. 
There is methodology of learning in general, and there 
are methodics for the several disciplines, or at least 
for each group of disciplines, into which learning is 
divided and subdivided in accordance with the logical 
processes adopted in any particular case, or in accord- 
ance with the objects of these disciplines. To each 
method of knowing, considered in itself, corresponds a 
teaching method, so that there is one general didactic 
method, and many special ones by which the general 
method is to be applied. 

But what is the method of a science if not the logical 
scheme or the form of a certain scientific knowledge? 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 147 

And, on the other hand, what can be known as to the 
form of anything, unless we have the thing itself be- 
fore us in its form and with its contents? In order 
to define the form of a science, and say, for example, 
that it is deductive in mathematics and inductive in 
chemistry, we must first presuppose the existence of 
these sciences themselves. But in them form is never 
anything indifferent to content; it is the form of that 
content. This is made clear if we consider the method- 
ologies which logicians presume to define in the ab- 
stract, and with no regard to the determined content 
of the corresponding sciences. We notice that they are 
able to present a successful exposition and formulation 
only by fixing the meaning of each formula by the use 
of examples, thereby passing from the abstract to the 
concrete, and showing the method to be within the 
concrete knowing out of which logic presumes to ex- 
tract it. In the same way every philosophical system 
has its method; but whenever criticism has endeavoured 
to fix abstractly the method of a system, in order then 
to show how it has been applied in the construction 
of the system itself, it has been forced in every case 
to admit that the method already contained the system 
within itself, that it was the system itself. So that 
it would have no value whatsoever, it could not even 
be grasped by thought in its particular determinate- 
ness, if it were not presented as the natural form of 
that precise thought. 



148 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

No harmful results would follow, if this assumption 
merely implied the accepting of science and methods 
as existing by themselves previous to the learning of 
science by means of its respective method; if it re- 
sulted merely in the failure to recognise the impossi- 
bility of conceiving science and methods as existing 
outside of the human mind where they actually do live 
and exist. If this were all, we should merely take 
notice of it as a speculative error which affected only 
the solution of the particular problem in which it ap- 
peared. But in the life of thought, where everything 
is united and connected in an organic system, every 
point of which is in relation to every other point, there 
is no error limited to a single problem; its effects are 
felt in the whole system, and they react on thought as 
a whole. And since thought is activity itself, — life's 
drama, as we called it, — every error infects the entire 
life. Let us then consider the consequences of this 
realistic conception of methodology. 

Science, we are told, in its abstract objectivity is 
one, immutable, unaltered: it is removed from the 
danger of error and of human fallibility, and protected 
from the alternate succession of ignorance and dis- 
covery; incapable therefore of progressing and of de- 
veloping because it was complete from the very begin- 
ning, and is eternally perfect. But such a Science is 
quite different from the one which grows in the life 
of culture, and is the free formation of the human per- 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 149 

sonality. This one is ever changing, always admitting 
all possible transformations, different from individual 
to individual, and different also in the mind of the 
same person. It lives only on condition that it never 
fix itself, that it never crystallise, that it place no 
limits to its development; it continues to be in virtue 
of its power to grow, to modify itself, to integrate itself 
and incessantly to develop. Science as culture, as per- 
sonality, is free, perennially becoming, stirred by 
ethical impulses, multiple, varied. If we fix the method, 
it indicates that we are dealing with science realistically 
considered as pre-existing, and we can therefore have 
only one sole, definite, immutable method, — one for 
everybody, and devoid of freedom, not susceptible of 
development, refractory to all moral evaluation. 
We should have then a rigid law of the spirit, as com- 
pelling as the laws of nature. But by obedience to 
such a principle, the spirit could not affirm itself: such 
compliance is surrender and abdication, not the reali- 
sation of some good. The most that could be said of 
it is that perhaps it prevents or annuls an evil which 
alienates us from a primitive good which is not ours, 
and not being ours cannot truly be good. 

A fixed method forces the spirit into this hopeless 
dilemma: (i) Either refuse to submit, and thus save 
life at the cost of all that makes life worth living — 
propter vitam vivendi perdere causas (which evidently 
would be the case, if we consider that the spirit lives 



I50 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

solely on condition that it recognise no pre-established 
laws, that it be free from the bondage of nature, that it 
create its own law, its own world, freely; and that, on 
the other hand, the cause of living, what constitutes 
the worth of life, is that enhancement of the spirit's 
reality which realises itself in science, and therefore 
in the method of science). 

(2) Or else submit, and kill life in the effort to save 
its worth — propter causas vivendi perdere vitam 
(which is absurd; for what is the worth of life if there 
is no life?). 

However that may be, the t3^e of education that 
presupposes a certain ideal of knowledge previously 
constituted and ready to be imparted by the teacher 
to the pupil in conformity with some suitable method, 
must follow a method, a unique one — the method of 
science, and therefore of the teacher, and therefore also 
of the pupil, whether the latter is capable of it or not. 
For it is tacitly assumed that science = method ; sci- 
ence = teacher ; science = pupil. On the strength 
of these equations the common term "science" should 
suffice to identify the first method, which is the one of 
science in itself, with the last, which is the method of 
science to be mastered by the pupil. But the above 
series of equations is false, because, admitting the first, 
the one namely on the basis of which we are now dis- 
cussing, neither the second nor the third is possible 
without passing from realistic to idealistic science, — 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 151 

two very different things, as I have shown. Even if 
we leave the teacher out of consideration, we shall 
have to remember that the pupil learns a science by 
making it his own, — a fallible science, which he may 
understand up to a certain point and no further. It 
will be one of the many sciences which have no one 
given method, but many of them, and the pupil can only 
avoid appropriating, individualising, subjectivising sci- 
ence by following that way which is very broad, very 
easy, and, alas, only too well beaten, — the royal road 
of non-learning, which is diligently upkept by all the 
schools which have to teach precise, well-defined sci- 
ence, and have a pre-established method by which to 
teach it. 

But, it might be objected, if science, realistically 
conceived, is a fictitious entity in no way correspond- 
ing to reality, how is it possible to have a method 
which by its uniqueness and definiteness effectively 
corresponds to the unalterable unity of this non-exist- 
ent science? And what teacher would ever arbitrarily 
impose on his students such an abstract and mechani- 
cal method? This is true enough; but man learns to 
compromise with all deities. Science included. This 
divinity, in order somehow to exist, must assume a few 
human traits without however renouncing her divine 
prerogatives. The fact that Apollo held no communion 
with the Pythian priestess did not remove the oracular 
sanctity from the Delphic response. For man knows 



152 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

no deity other than the one which he is capable of con- 
ceiving with his soul, just as he knows no other red 
besides the one which he sees with his own eyes. 

Science, which he considers as an object existing in 
itself, outside of his and other human minds, and 
therefore endowed with absolute validity in all its 
branches and in the articulations of these branches, is 
nothing but the science which he knows. And he 
knows it because he has constructed it in the form in 
which he knows it: jingit creditique. But this absence 
of consciousness from the constructing, and the con- 
sequent faith in the realistic value of science, deter- 
mine the positions and the doctrines which produce 
the consequences I have deplored. For he who es- 
tablishes a school and enacts its regulations takes as 
a model his own science, without at all being aware 
that it is only his own. It becomes therefore the 
content of the institution and determines its method. 
But a teacher who does not feel inclined to teach that 
given science and to adopt that special method creates 
his own ideal, which is but the projection of his per- 
sonal culture; and unable to account critically for 
the intrinsic connection existing between his ideal and 
his personality, he too fiitgit creditique. He believes 
that the school authority has erred, and that Science, 
as he understands it, must be kept distinct from the 
official doctrines. But in his mind his science is not 
his own. It is, he is confident, that Sovereign Science 



THE BIAS OF REALISM I53 

which by his method and through his cult must en- 
lighten the school over which he rules. And so at the 
point of arrival where the realistic conception of 
methods must work, it is found to be effective not- 
withstanding the rebuffs of reality, and it works. It 
works and it acts in the only way that it is possible 
for it to act, namely, by going amiss. It fails and 
will always continue to fail, not so much because every 
pupil has his own personality and will have his own 
particular culture with its corresponding method, but 
especially because whatever the number of the pupils 
in a school, the human mind knows of no culture 
which is not also its own free development, its autono- 
mous ethical becoming. A science, which is supposed 
to exist before the spirit, becomes a thing, and will 
never again be able to trace its way back to the spirit. 
By presupposing science, teachers materialise the cul- 
ture in whose development education consists; and this 
materiality of a culture known to teachers renders im- 
possible that other culture which is unknown to teach- 
ers, which is going to be not theirs, but the pupils', 
for whom they work and in whose behalf the school 
was instituted. 

Methods, programmes, and manuals most conspicu- 
ously reveal the realistic prejudices of school tech- 
nique; and against these educators should constantly 
be on their guard. For these prejudices have, as Vico 
would put it, an eternal motive, which at times seems 



154 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

to be definitely uprooted and completely done away 
with, only to reappear, alas! in a different form and 
with an ever renewed lease of life. The motive is the 
following: The school is created when people are con- 
scious of a certain amount of knowledge already at- 
tained, well defined, and recognised as valuable. 
Likewise man's value socially is estimated on the work 
done, and it is on the basis of this finished work that he 
is credited with the acquisition of a certain personality. 
This is assuredly no longer a becoming but a being; 
an existent thing, already realised, which, though a 
contradiction in terms for those of us who have mas- 
tered the concept of the attributes of the spirit, is not 
thereby condemned as accidental and disposed of once 
for all. For it is also true that culture, personality, 
science, — spiritual reality in short, — is a reality, and 
true it is that when we know it, we know it as already 
realised. We may indeed have a very keen and lively 
sentiment of the subjectivity, and inwardness, and new- 
ness or originality of our culture, in which, for example, 
Dante, Dante himself, is our Dante, is "We." But 
yet this "We" looms before us as a truth which trans- 
cends our particular "we." It is truth; it is science. 
And before this divine Truth, before this Science, we 
too fall on our knees, because it is no longer a mythol- 
ogy, but — our experience, our life. 

Thus we think; thus, spiritually, we live. I medi- 
tate and inquire into the mystery of the universe un- 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 155 

ceasingly; but in the background of my inquiry, from 
time to time a solution appears, a discovery which 
urges my exploring mind onward. Mystery itself is 
not mystery unless it be known as such, and then 
it becomes knowledge. Inquiry is therefore at once 
a research and a discovery. And this untiring ac- 
tivity, which knows neither sleep nor rest, is mir- 
rored before its own eyes and lives in the fond contem- 
plation of its reflected image, which image in its 
objectivity appears to it as fixed as it, the activity, 
is mobile. And no man ever felt so keenly the humil- 
ity and meanness of his powers, no one ever presumed 
so little of himself, that he could not yet be drawn by 
his own nature to idolise himself, to see himself before 
himself, exactly as he is, as what he cannot but be. 
And on the other hand we cannot but affirm our im- 
mortal faith in the absolute truth of the ideals which 
impose upon us sentiments of humility. 

The error which we must victoriously contend 
against is not this ingenuous and unconquered faith in 
the objectivity of thought (which is also the objectivity 
of all things). What we must fight against is mental 
torpor and the sloth of the heart, which induce us to 
stop in front of the object as soon as we get it. A 
deplorable failing indeed, since the object is lost in 
the very act by which we grasp it, and we must again 
resume our work and toil some more in order to attain 
it again. For the object, in short, does exist, but in 



156 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

the subject; and in order to be a living and real object 
it must live on the life itself of the subject. 

A textbook is a textbook: when it was written, and if 
its author was capable of thinking and of living in his 
thought, it too was a living thing; and a living thing, 
that is, spirit, it will continue to be for the instructor 
who does not through indolence allow himself to be- 
lieve that all the thinking demanded by the subject was 
done once for all by the author of the manual. For 
the manual, as a book intended for the teacher, meant 
to be constantly awakened by teachers to an ever 
quickened life, the life of the spirit, can only be what 
the instructor makes it. He, therefore, must have cul- 
ture enough to read it as his book; he must be able to 
restore it to life, to re-create it by the living process 
of his personal thought. This done, he will have done 
but one-half of the work needed to transform himself 
from a reader into a teacher. For his reading must 
lead up to the reading of the pupils; and they ought 
not to be confronted with the finished product of a 
culture turned out, all ready-made by tlie mechanism 
of the handbook. So that we should now complete 
our previous statement, and say that the teacher re- 
creates the book when he revives it in the mind of the 
one for whom the book was written; when author, 
teacher, and pupil constitute but one single spirit, 
whose life animates and inwardly vivifies the manual, 
which therefore ought not to be called, as it is, a 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 157 

hand-hook, but a spiritual guide for the mind. Un- 
fortunately the oft-deplored indolence which freezes 
and stiffens spiritual life fastens the books to the hands 
of the teacher first, and then to those of the pupils. 

Teachers should carefully watch themselves. If the 
book begins to feel heavy in their hands, it is a sign 
that it is becoming a burden on the pupils' minds. It 
will end by stifling their mental life, unless its oppres- 
sive dulness is dispelled by the reawakened conscious- 
ness of the instructor. Teachers should never for an 
instant become remiss in their loving solicitude for 
their school. When their book, the book they selected 
for their pupils, as the means of imparting the culture 
for which the school stands, ceases to be the pupils' 
book, cherished by them as a thing of their own, in- 
timately bound up with their persons, then it is high 
time to throw it away. For the moment a book loses 
its power to attract it instantly begins to repel. It 
then becomes an instrument of torture and a menace 
for the life of the youthful minds entrusted to the 
teachers' care. 

Dictionaries and grammars go side by side with 
handbooks, — instruments of culture that are only too 
often converted into engines of torture. The abuse 
of these books, especially noticeable in the secondary 
schools, is not limited to them, but is infecting primary 
instruction too, and teachers should know what such 
books are, and be enlightened as to their limitations. 



158 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

Otherwise the dictionary becomes the cemetery of 
speech, and grammar the annexed dissecting room. A 
lexicon is a burial ground for the mortal remains of 
those living beings which we call human words, each one 
of which always lives in a context, not because it is there 
in bodily company, in the society of other words, but 
because in every context it has a special signification, 
being the form of a precise thought or state of mind, 
as we may wish to call it. A word need not be joined 
to other words to form that complex which gramma- 
rians call a sentence. It may stand alone, all by itself, 
and constitute a discourse, and express a thought, even 
a very great thought. The *'fiat" of the book of Gene- 
sis is an example. What is requisite is that the word, 
whether by itself or with others, should adhere to the 
personality, to the spiritual situation, and be the actual 
expression of a soul. When joined to the soul a word, 
which materially is identical with countless other words 
uttered by other souls, and with the peculiar accents 
of the respective personalities, reveals its particular 
expression, is a particular word not to be ever com- 
pared with any of those countless ones materially 
identical with it. The biblical "fiat,'* repeated by men 
who feel within them the almighty Word of the Crea- 
tor, is constantly taking on new shades of meaning, is 
always reinforced by richer tones, and will always 
continue to do so, as a result of the numerous ways that 
men have of picturing to themselves the deity, and in 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 159 

accordance with the variety of doctrines, phantasies, 
and sentiments, or whatever other forms of activity 
may converge into the expression of a person's spiritual 
life. So that if, abstractly considered, it is the word 
that we read, always the same, in the sublime passage 
of Genesis, in reality it lives in an infinite number of 
forms, as though an infinite number of words. 

But in dictionaries, words are sundered from the 
minds, detached from the context, soulless and dead. 
A good lexicon — and those that are put in the hands 
of pupils are seldom satisfactory — should always in 
some way restore the word to the natural context, en- 
chase it, so to speak, in the jewel from which it was 
torn. It should never presume to give meanings of 
abstracted words, but ought to point them out as they 
exist historically in the authors who are deemed worthy 
representatives of the language or of the literature. 
Dictionaries so compiled do away partly with the ob- 
jectionable abstractness, but are yet unable to conjure 
the dead from their tombs. Their weakness and in- 
sufficiency lie first of all in the fact that the true context 
of a word, in which it lives concretely, and from which 
therefore it draws its meaning, is in reality not the 
brief phrase, which is all that historical dictionaries 
can quote, but rather the entire work of the author 
from which the quoted phrase derives whatever colours 
it may possess and its own peculiar shade. And the 
whole work in turn can be understood only in con- 



i6o THE BIAS OF REALISM 

nection with the boundless historical environments out 
of which it emerges, in which it lives, and where its 
thoughts receive their peculiar colouring and their spe- 
cial significance. The insufficiency of the diction- 
ary comes out even more clearly from another and 
more important consideration. An historical diction- 
ary of the Italian language will, for example, tell us 
how Machiavelli used the word "virtue" (virtu), and 
by the examples adduced we should see or perhaps sur- 
mise the meaning of that word, the knowledge of which 
is not just mere erudition, in as much as in the mind 
of the cultured reader the thought of Machiavelli is 
restored to life, and with it the concept which he was 
wont to express by the term "virtue." But idealis- 
tically speaking, is this word Machiavelli's or is it 
ours, — a word belonging to us who are inquiring into 
his thoughts? It is ours, by all means, and for the 
reason that it belongs to our Machiavelli. Unless we 
have then within us this our Machiavelli, it is useless 
for us to search for the meaning of the word in the dic- 
tionary. In it surely we may find it, but as a dead 
body to be resurrected only by remembering that its 
life is not in the printed page but in us, and only in 
us. In oui life everything will have to be resuscitated 
that is to become part of our culture. 

And the same applies to grammars. As people con- 
ceive them and use them, what are they if not a 
schematic arrangement of the forms by which words 



THE BIAS OF REALISM i6i 

are joined so as to constitute speech? And how can we 
cut the discourse to the quick and extract these 
schemes, without at the same time destroying its life? 
The scheme is a "part of speech," and it is a rule. 
Grammar is a series of rules regarding the parts of 
speech, considered singly and collectively. But the 
grammatical scheme — part of speech or rule — abstracts 
a generic form from the particular expression in such 
a way that the paradigm of a conjugation, for example, 
shall be the conjugation of many verbs but not of any 
determined one. The rule governing the use of the 
conditional is in the same way referred to every verb 
which expresses a conditional act or occurrence, but 
to no one verb in a peculiar manner. But since no 
speech contains a verb which might present to us a 
verbal form which is not also the form of a determined 
verb, nor a conditional which does not point with pre- 
cision to the action or occurrence subordinated to a 
condition, it is evident that the scheme places before 
us, not the living and concrete body of the speech, but 
a dissected and dead part of this body. 

I shall not here recall the controversies occasioned by 
the difficulties inherent in the normative character ordi- 
narily attributed to grammatical schemes. I shall 
simply note that a scheme becomes intelligible only 
if the example accompanies it; and the example always 
turns out to be a living discourse, within which there- 
fore we meet again the scheme, but liberated from the 



i62 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

presumed abstractness to which it had been confined 
by the grammarian. And I shall merely add that the 
grammatical norm, which in the realistic conception of 
grammar is presented as a rule, anteceding actual 
speech both in time and ideally, has in reality no 
validity whatsoever excepting as a law internal to the 
speaking itself, which brings out its normative force 
only in the act itself of speaking. In spite of this, 
however, the majority of people consider grammar as 
an antecedent to speech and to thought, and therefore 
to the life of the spirit. It appears to them as a reef 
on which the freedom of the personality must be driven 
in the course of its becoming, bearing down as it does 
on a past which is believed to exist beneath the horizon 
of actuality and beyond the present life of the spirit. 
To them grammar is legislation passed by former writ- 
ers and speakers, prescribing norms for those who 
intend to use the same language in the future. 
Against this myth, and the consequent idol of grammar 
worshipped as a thing which has not only the right, but 
the means also, of controlling and oppressing the cre- 
ative spontaneity of speech, teachers should be con- 
stantly on their guard, if they feel bound to respect and 
protect the spirituality of culture 

Neither grammar then, nor rhetoric, nor any kind 
of misguided preceptive teaching should be allowed to 
introduce into the school the menace of realism which 
lurks naturally in the shadow of all prescriptive sys- 



THE BIAS OF REALISM 163 

terns. A precept is a mere historical indication, a 
sign which points to something that was done as to 
something that had to be done then and is to be done 
now. It was done and it was thought that it had to 
be done. But what was done cannot be done over 
again, and what was thought cannot again be thought. 
Life knows no past other than the one which it con- 
tains within its living present. The precept has no 
value excepting as that precept which we in every 
single instance intuit, and which we must intuit, being 
spiritually alive and free, as the peculiar form of our 
thought, of our speaking, of our doing, of our being, 
in short, which is our becoming. If we look upon a 
precept as transcending this becoming, and as an ante- 
cedent to it, we misapprehend and therefore imperil 
our indwelling freedom, which for us now ought to 
mean not simply the failure to foster the growth of the 
spirit, but a deliberate attempt to hinder and thwart 
its development and to blight the function of culture. 
One more prejudice of those imputed to realistic 
instruction must still be pointed out, and it will be the 
last. It is one of those time-worn devices whose his- 
tory, extending over a thousand years, reflects the en- 
tire life of the school — the composition. Teachers 
expect and demand that a predetermined and definite 
theme, as a nucleus of a thought organism, as leit- 
motif, so to speak, of a work of art, as a ruling prin- 
ciple for moral or speculative reflections, be developed 



i64 THE BIAS OF REALISM 

by pupils who may yet have never given the topic a 
single thought, who may possibly be not at all attuned 
to that definite spiritual vibration, who may in short 
be quite removed from the line along which the theme 
should be developed. In the lower grades the line 
itself is marked, the entire contour is given, and the 
pupil's mind is arbitrarily encompassed within this 
fixed outline. These methods are now fortunately 
applied with diminished rigour and less crudely than 
before. But the fact remains that in all classes the 
teacher either assigns a theme at random, picking a 
topic from a casual reading or from among the whims 
of his rambling fancy, or else he conscientiously and 
carefully studies the possibilities of a subject, and 
develops it to a certain extent before he assigns it; so 
that he naturally expects the pupil's treatment to con- 
form to his own delineation; and he values the com- 
position in proportion as it approaches the rough draft 
which he had previously sketched in his mind. 

Here too, as elsewhere, we encounter the difficulty 
of a thought which is presupposed to thinking, which 
therefore binds it, strains it and racks it out of its 
healthy and fruitful growth; for thought cannot live 
without freedom. The dangers are many that beset 
us in the practice of theme-composition, and not all 
of them of a merely intellectual character. There 
is no intellectual deficiency which is not also at the 
same time a moral blemish; and a course of exercises. 



THE BIAS QF REALISM 165 

such as we have considered, not only jeopardises the 
formation of the intelligence by urging it along a line 
of false and empty artificiality to the postiche and the 
applique, but it also, and far more seriously, threatens 
the moral character of the pupils in that it beguiles 
them into a sinful familiarity with insincerity, which 
might perhaps become downright cheating. 

Composition however in itself is not taboo for the 
idealist. Like grammar and every other instrument 
of the teaching profession it must be converted from 
the abstract to the concrete. We should never demand 
of the pupil an inventiveness beyond his powers, never 
unfairly expect of his mind what it cannot yet give. 
The boy must not be given a subject drawn from a 
world with which he is unfamiliar. But when the sub- 
ject springs naturally from the pupil's own soul, in the 
atmosphere of the school, and as a part of the spirit- 
ual life which unites him to his teacher and to his 
classmates, then composition, like every other element 
of a freely developing culture, is a creation and an 
unfailing progress. For whatever has been frozen by 
the chill of realism, and has been consequently made 
unfit for the life of the spirit, may again be revived in 
the warmth of the living intelligence of the concrete, 
and be thence idealistically fused with the spontaneous 
and vigorous current of spiritual reality. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

Having exemplified the prejudices of realism in the 
phases that are most harmful to education, I shall now 
proceed to discuss the fundamental corollary of the 
idealistic thesis as an effective remedy against the rav- 
ages of realism. For, as I have already shown, the 
realistic conception of life and culture is by no means 
a minor error which could be corrected as soon as dis- 
covered. Originating in a primitive tendency which 
impels the human spirit on through a realistic phase 
before it can freely emerge into the loftier conscious- 
ness of self and power (which is the conquest of ideal- 
ism), this error again and again crops out of even the 
most convinced anti-realistic consciousness. So that 
if at any moment our higher reflection slackens its 
vigilance, the error creeps back into the midst of our 
ideas, gains control of our intelligence, and resumes 
its former sway over thought. It is not sufficient 
then to become aware of the faults of realism and of the 
prejudices in which it is mirrored; we must, in addi- 
tion to all this, strengthen in our minds the intuition 
of the spirituality of culture, render it more subtle, 
more accurate, more certain, and bring to it the energy 

166 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 167 

of a faith which, after taking possession of our souls, 
shall become our life's character. 

We must therefore look intently at the significance 
of that principle which identifies culture with man's 
personality, notice its most important consequences, 
and set these up as the laws of education, since by 
education we mean the creation of a living culture 
which shall be the life of the human mind. The first 
and foremost of these consequences, the direct corol- 
lary of our proposition, is the concept of the Unity of 
Education. Though often referred to, it has not yet 
been attained by pedagogical doctrines, nor has it been 
the aim of the work of teachers. Neither theory nor 
practice — more intimately connected than is ordinarily 
supposed — shows as yet that this concept is under- 
stood and adequately appreciated. It is opposed with 
full force by the realistic conception which, keeping 
man distinct from his culture, and materialising this 
culture, naturally attributes to it, and to education in 
which it is reflected, that multiplicity and fragmen- 
tariness which is the characteristic of things mate- 
rial. 

This scrappiness of culture and of education is the 
error on which all the prejudices of realistic pedagogy 
are grounded. It is the enemy that must be van- 
quished in the course of the crusade that has been 
preached by idealism in its endeavour to liberate 
instruction from the deadly oppression of mechanism. 



i68 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

But in order to combat this foe we must first know it: 
and we must gain a clear understanding of that unity 
of education which it antagonises with uncompromising 
opposition. 

If we open a treatise on pedagogy or examine a 
schedule of courses, if we look through a programme 
or stop to consider our every-day technical terminol- 
ogy, we cannot help noticing that education is broken 
up by divisions and subdivisions ad infinitum, exactly 
as though it were a material object, which because 
material possesses infinite divisibility. Textbooks tell 
us that education is (i) physical, (2) intellectual, (3) 
moral. Then narrowing the subject down to one 
section, the intellectual, which for good reasons has 
been treated more carefully and sympathetically by 
traditional pedagogy, we find some such subdivisions: 
artistic, scientific, literary, philosophical, religious, etc. 
Again, artistic education will be split up into as many 
sections as there are arts, and scientific instruction in 
the same way; for pedagogy assigns to each branch 
of the classification its corresponding method of teach- 
ing. It goes without saying that the sciences of any 
given branch are different among themselves, and the 
study of botany, for example, is not the study of 
zoology. And there are as many forms of culture 
to be promoted by education as there are sciences; 
which is clearly shown by school announcements assign- 
ing to certain years, and for definite days and hours, 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 169 

the several courses of the curriculum, that is, the sev- 
eral educations. 

It is taken for granted that Education, properly so 
called, will result from the ensemble of these particular 
educations — physical, intellectual, moral, etc., — each 
one of which contributes its share to the final result, 
and is therefore a part of the entire education. And 
each field produces certain peculiar results which it 
would be idle to demand of another section, just as 
we never expect an olive grove to yield a crop of 
peaches. Every part, self-contained and quite dis- 
tinct from the rest, absolutely excludes all other parts 
from itself. Therefore the subjects taught in a school 
are numerous, and there must accordingly be special- 
ised teachers. And again each instructor must be 
careful not to mix up the several parts which compose 
his subject. The teacher of history, for example, when 
he takes up the French Revolution, must forget the 
unification of Italy, and treat each event in order and 
in turn; and the instructor of Italian will take up the 
history of literature on a certain day of the week, and 
devote some other hour to the study of the individual 
works themselves. 

So also we never fail to distinguish and carefully 
separate the two parts of the teacher's work, his ability 
as a disciplinarian and his skill in imparting informa- 
tion, for it is an accepted commonplace of school tech- 
nique that ability to teach is one thing, and the power 



I70 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

to maintain discipline is another. It is one thing to 
be able to keep the class attentive to the discussion of 
a given subject, and quite another to treat this subject 
suitably for the needs and attainments of the pupils. 
Discipline is considered thus as a mere threshold; the 
real teaching comes after. For, it is argued, disciphne 
has no cultural content; it is nothing more than the 
spiritual disposition and adaptation which should pre- 
cede the acquisition, or if we so wish to call it, the 
development of real culture, — a disposition which is 
obtained when respect for the authority of the teacher 
is ensured. 

The recognition of that authority simply means the 
establishment of a necessary condition; as for the real 
work of education, that is yet to come. And if we 
should stop at what we have called the threshold, we 
should have no school at all. There are teachers, in 
fact, who keep good discipline, but who are yet unable 
to teach, either through lack of culture or because they 
are deficient in methods. 

All these are commonplaces to which we often, resort 
without stopping to consider their validity. And, in 
truth, it is because of this lack of consideration that 
we are able to use them without noticing their absurdi- 
ties and without therefore feeling the necessity of 
emending our ways. This lack of reflection resolves it- 
self into a lack of precision in the handling of these 
concepts. They are formulated without much rigour 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 171 

with a great deal of elasticity, and in the spirit of com- 
promising with that truth against which they would 
otherwise too jarringly clash. 

First of all, no one has ever conceived the possibility 
of separating discipline from education. What is often 
done is to distinguish discipline from that part of edu- 
cation which is called instruction, and to consider the 
two as integrating the total concept of education. 
Mention is often made of the educational value of dis- 
cipline. But this kind of co-ordination of the two 
forms of education — discipline and instruction — and 
their subordination to the generic concept of education 
are more easily formulated than comprehended. For 
if we should distinguish them simply on the grounds 
that one is the necessary antecedent of the other, we 
should have a relationship similar to that which con- 
nects any part of instruction with the part which must 
be presupposed before it as an antecedent moment in 
the same process of development. But the relationship 
which exists between any two parts of instruction can- 
not serve to distinguish from instruction a thing which 
is different from it. 

We might wish, perhaps, to consider as characteristic 
of this absolute antecedence the establishment of the 
authority without which teaching, properly so called, 
cannot begin. But the objection to this would be that 
every moment of the teaching process presupposes a 
new authority, which can never be considered as defi- 



172 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

nitely acquired, which is constantly being imposed 
anew, and which must proceed at every given instance 
from the effective spiritual action exercised by the 
teacher upon the pupil. In other words, I mean to 
say that no teacher is able independently of the merits 
of his teaching to maintain discipline simply and solely 
on the strength of his personal prestige, of his force of 
character, or any other suitable qualification. For 
whoever he may be, and whatever the power by which 
at the start he is able to attract the attention of his 
pupils and to keep it riveted on his words, the teacher as 
he begins to impart information ceases to be what he 
was immediately before, and becomes to the eyes of 
his pupils an ever changing individual, — bigger or 
smaller, stronger or weaker, and therefore mor^- or less 
worthy of that attention and that respect of which 
boys are capable in their expectance of spiritual light 
and joy. The initial presentation is nothing more than 
a promise and an anticipation. In the course of teach- 
ing this anticipation must not be disappointed, this 
promise must be constantly fulfilled and more than 
fulfilled by the subsequent developments. The teach- 
er's personality as revealed at the beginning must be 
borne out by all that he does in the course of the 
lesson. Experience confirms this view, and the reason 
of it is to be found in the doctrine now familiar to us 
of the spirit that never is definitely, but is always con- 
stituting itself, always becoming. And every man is 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 173 

esteemed and appreciated on the strength of what he 
shows himself to be at any given moment, and in virtue 
of the experience which we continue to have of his 
being, — a being which is the development in which he 
realises himself. 

So, then, discipline is never enforced definitely and 
in such a way that the teacher may proceed to build 
on it as on a firm basis without any further concern. 
And it is therefore difficult to see how we could possibly 
sever with a clean cut the task of keeping discipline 
from the duty of imparting instruction. 

Nor is it any more plausible to maintain that dis- 
cipline, though it may not chronologically precede in- 
struction, is its logical antecedent, in the sense that 
there are at every instant of the life of the school both 
discipline and instruction, the former as a condition of 
the latter. The difficulty here is that if we assumed 
this, we ought to be able to indicate the difference be- 
tween the condition and the conditioned; which dif- 
ference, unless we rest content with vague words, is 
not forthcoming, and cannot be found. I maintain 
that were it possible for the teacher definitely to en- 
throne, so to speak, discipline in his school, all his work 
were done. He would have fulfilled his entire duty, 
acquitted his obligation, and achieved the results of his 
mission, whether we look upon this mission in the com- 
plex of its development, or whether we consider it 
ideally in the instant of its determined act, which is yet 



174 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

a process and therefore a development. For what, 
in fact, is discipline? Is it established authority? 
But this authority is the whole of education. For 
authority cannot be, as I have explained before, a mere 
claim: it must become actual in the effective action 
performed by the educating personality, and this action 
is education. And when this education consists, for 
example, in the imparting of a rule of syntax, education 
becomes actual when the pupil really apprehends that 
rule from his instructor exactly as it is taught to him, 
and thus appropriates the teacher's manner of think- 
ing and his intellectual behaviour on that special sub- 
ject, and acts and does as the teacher wants him to. 
And from the point of view of discipline, this is all 
we want at that moment. 

If in the course of education, considered as a whole 
or at any particular moment of it, we should separate 
discipline from instruction, now turning our attention 
to the one and now to the other, we know from expe- 
rience that we should never get anywhere. As a mat- 
ter of fact, the distinction thrusts itself to the fore only 
when the problem of discipline is erroneously formu- 
lated by treating it abstractly. For who is it that 
worries over discipline as such, and as though it were 
a thing different from teaching? Who is it that looks 
upon this problem as an insoluble one? Only the 
teacher who, unable to maintain discipline, frets over 
it and failing to discover it where it is naturally to be 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 175 

found, desperately looks for it where it is not, where 
it could not possibly be. And so he is helplessly per- 
turbed, like the man who, feeling upon himself the 
concentrated gaze of all the guests seated in a parlour, 
is no longer able to walk across the floor; it is the 
same difficulty and impediment we encounter every 
time we try to watch and study our movements. In 
the same way the spontaneous outburst of eloquent 
sentiments that flow from the fulness of our hearts is 
checked by the endeavour to analyse them, to study the 
words — to substitute art for nature. 

The real teacher, the naturally gifted teacher, never 
bothers about these puzzling questions of pedagogical 
discipline. He teaches with such devotion; he is so 
close spiritually to his pupils, so sympathetic with 
their views; his work is so serious, so sincere, so eager, 
so full of life, that he is never compelled to face a 
recalcitrant, rebellious personality that could only be 
reduced by resorting to the peculiar means of discipline. 
The docility of the pupils in the eyes of the able teacher 
is neither an antecedent nor a consequent of his teach- 
ings; it is an aspect of it. It originates with the very 
act by which he begins to teach, and ceases with the 
end of his teaching. Concretely, the discipline which 
good teachers enforce in the classroom is the natural 
behaviour of the spirit which adheres to itself in the 
seriousness and inwardness of its own work. Dis- 
cipline, authority, and respect for authority are absent 



176 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

whenever it is impossible to establish that unique su- 
perior personality, in which the spiritual life of the 
pupils and of the teachers are together fused and 
united. Whenever the students fail to find their ideal 
in the teacher; when they are disappointed by his 
aspect, his gaze, his words, in the complex concreteness 
of his spiritual personality, which does not rise to the 
ideal which at every moment is present in their ex- 
pectations, then the order of discipline is lacking. But 
when this actual unity obtains — this unity which is 
the task of the teacher, and the aim of all education 
— then discipline, authority, and respect are present 
as never failing elements. 

This pedagogical problem of discipline would never 
have arisen if immature reflection had not distinguished 
two empirically different aspects of' human persei^ality, 
the practical and the theoretical, whereby it would 
appear that man, when he 'does 'things, should not be 
considered in the same light as when he thinks and 
understands, knows and learns. From this point of 
view, discipline of deportment is to be referred to the 
pupil as practical spiritual activity, while teaching aims 
at his theoretic activity. The former should guide the 
pupil, regulate his conduct as a member of that special 
community which we call the school, and facilitate the 
fulfilment of the obligations which he has toward the 
institution, toward his fellow-pupils, and toward him- 
self. The latter, on the other hand, assuming the com- 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 177 

pletion of this practical edification, proceeds to the 
mental formation of the personality, considered as 
progressive acquirement of culture. Discipline in this 
system appears to be the morals of the school. I use 
the word morals in a very broad sense — just as moral- 
ity might be considered as the discipline of society 
and of life in general. For everybody, it is argued, 
distinguishes between the character of man and his 
intelligence, between his conduct and his knowledge. 
The two terms may indeed be drawn together, but they 
also exist quite apart. So that a man devoid of char- 
acter, or possessed with an indomitable will for evil, 
may nevertheless be extremely learned and shrewd, or 
as subtle as the serpent; whereas a moral man, through 
lack of understanding, may become the sport of rogues, 
and remain illiterate, devoid of all, even of the slightest 
accomplishments. For will is one thing, they say, and 
the intellect is another. 

The question of the abstractness of discipline impels 
us now to examine the legitimacy of this broader dis- 
tinction, which does not simply concern the problems 
of the school, but extends to the fundamental principles 
of the philosophy of the spirit. Under its influence, 
contemporary thought attacks all the surviving forms 
of this ancient distinction between will and intellect, 
which rested on a frankly realistic intuition of the 
world. The philosopher who crystallised this distinc- 
tion, and fastened it so hard that it could not be broken 



178 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

up completely in the course of all subsequent specu- 
lation, was Aristotle. A thoroughgoing realist, like 
all Greek philosophers, he conceived reality as some- 
thing external and antecedent to the mind which thinks 
it and strives to know it. When thought, whose 
function is the knowing of reality, is thus placed outside 
of this reality, it is evident that the knowledge to which 
it aspired never could have been an activity which pro- 
duces reality. It was accordingly maintained that 
knowledge could not be more than a mere survey, a 
view of reality (intuition, theory), almost like a re- 
flected image, totally extrinsic to the essence of the real. 
But since it was evident that man as spiritual activity 
does produce a world of his own, for which he is praised 
if it is deemed good, but blamed if it is judged bad, 
it had to follow that there were two distinct aspects 
in human life: one by which man contemplates realit}^, 
the other by which he creates his own world, — a world, 
however, which is but a transformation of the true 
and original reality. These two aspects are the will 
and the intellect. 

It should not now be necessary to criticise this con- 
cept of a reality assumed to exist, in antecedence to 
the activity of the spirit, and which is the sole support 
of this distinction between will and intellect. We 
might say perhaps that though everything does indeed 
depend from the spirit, and though all is spirit, yet 
this completely spiritual reality is on one hand what 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 179 

is produced, the realisation of new realities (will), but 
on the other hand it is but the knowledge of its own 
reality, and by this knowledge gives no increment to 
its being. However, if we adopted this view, we 
would slip back to the position we abandoned as un- 
tenable, since a thought which propounds the problem 
of its essence and of the essence of the reality which 
it cognises can be but mere knowing. For it is again 
faced by a reality — even though it has in this case 
been arbitrarily presumed identical with it — a reality 
which is as an antecedent to it, and leaves to it only 
the task of looking on. So we must conclude that the 
life of the spirit is never mere contemplation. What 
seems to be contemplation — that consciousness which 
the spirit acquires of itself, and, acquiring which, real- 
ises itself — is a creation: a creation not of things but 
of its own self. For what are things but the spirit as 
it is looked at abstractly in the multiplicity of its 
manifestations? 

We shall more easily understand that our knowing 
and our doing are indiscernible, if we recall that our 
doing is not what is also perceived externally, a motion 
in space caused by us. This external manifestation is 
quite subordinate and adventitious. The essential 
character of our doing is the internal will, which does 
not, properly speaking, modify things^ but does modify 
us, by bringing out in us a personality which otherwise 
would not have been. This is the substance of the will, 



i8o THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

which we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I 
have shown, development, and therefore continuous 
self-creation of the personality. 

If intellect then and will are one and the same thing, 
to such an extent that there is no intellect which in its 
development is not development of personality, forma- 
tion of character, realisation of a spiritual reality, we 
shall be able to understand that the ideas of two dis- 
tinct spiritual activities, as the basis of the ordinary 
distinction between moral and intellectual training, are 
mere abstractions that tend to lead us away from the 
comprehension of the living reality of the spirit. This 
distinction appears to me exceedingly harmful, nothing 
being more deplorable, from the moral point of view, 
than to consider any part of the life we have to live as 
morally indifferent; and nothing being more harmful to 
the school than the conviction that the moral formation 
of man is not the entire purpose of education, but only 
a part of its content. It is indispensable, I maintain, 
that the educator have the reverent consciousness of 
the extremely delicate moral value of every single word 
which he addresses to his pupils and of the profoundly 
ethical essence of the instruction which he imparts to 
them. For the school which gives instruction with no 
moral training in reaUty gives no instruction at all. All 
the objections voiced on this score against education, 
which we try to meet by adding on to instruction all 
that ought to integrate the truly educational function, 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION i8i 

are the result of this abstract way of looking upon in- 
struction solely as the culture of an intellect which in 
some way differs from the will, from character, and 
from moral personality. 

I wish here to call attention to one of the most con- 
troverted questions connected with popular education, 
because it brings out very clearly the impossibility of 
keeping moral education distinct from intellectual in- 
struction. It is constantly asserted that the instruction 
of the common people, that real education which is the 
main purpose of the modern state, is not a question of 
mere reading and spelling; that these do not constitute 
culture, but are as means to an end, and ought never 
to be allowed to take the place of the end to which they 
are subservient. The school therefore, if it cannot 
shape men, should at least rough-hew them and give 
them a conscience, whereas now, it teaches but often 
does not educate: it gives to the learner the means of 
culture, and then abandons him to his own resources. 
The optimism of educators in the eighteenth century, 
their promise that marvels would come out of elemen- 
tary instruction propagated and spread by popular 
schools devised for this purpose, was constantly met in 
the course of the last century by an ever-growing mis- 
trust of instruction generally restricted to the notion 
of mere instrumentality. For in addition to other 
shortcomings it was felt that this instrument might 
be put to a very bad use; that elementary learning 



i82 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

might be a dangerous thing if it were not accompanied 
by something that instruction pure and simple cannot 
give, namely, soundness of heart, strength of mind, and 
conscience strong enough to uphold intelligence by the 
vigorous and uncompromising principles of moral rec- 
titude. The hopefulness of that past optimism is fast 
yielding ground to the pessimistic denunciation of the 
insufficiency of mere instruction for the moral ends of 
life. 

There is a serious error in this frequent indictment 
brought against mere instruction as a means of attain- 
ing what is called culture. It proceeds from the at- 
tempt to separate something that was not meant to be 
separated. "What God hath united together, man shall 
not put asunder." And, in any event, a separation as 
illegitimate as this is not possible. Superficially we may 
distinguish and apparently sunder instruction from 
moral training, cut off the means from the end, and 
separate the ability to read and write from what we are 
thereby enabled to read and write. In fact the letters 
of the alphabet are taught without teaching the syllables 
which they compose, and without the words that are 
made up of these syllables, and the thoughts that are 
expressed by these words, and man's life which becomes 
manifest and real in these thoughts. The elementary 
school is in fact, as it is in name, the teaching of the 
elements. Reading, writing, arithmetic, all subjects 
called for by the school programme are taken up as 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 183 

mere elements with which the pupil is expected, later 
on, to compose his Book of Life, complete in all its 
sections. But in the meantime it is thought unwise 
to burden his youthful mind with the weighty and 
complicated problems that can be solved only by the 
experience of a more mature life. Of course after 
he has gone forth from the school into the outer world 
the young man will look upon this" elementary knowl- 
edge as the raw material of his future mentality. As 
he carves out his path to this or that goal, in accord- 
ance with his spiritual interests and in compliance with 
the contingencies of life, he will avail himself of this 
initial instruction, use it to further his progress towards 
this or that end, good or evil as the case may be. For 
intellectual instruction, it is argued, can be made sub- 
servient either to noble impulses or to base motives. 
Careful consideration, however, will show that the 
responsibility of a school for what is called moral in- 
sufficiency, but is in reality educational defectiveness, 
cannot be removed by this kind of considerations. The 
alphabet begins to be such when it ceases to be a series 
of physical marks corresponding to the sounds into 
which all the words of a language may be decomposed. 
The alphabetic symbol is effectively such when it is a 
sound, and it is sound when it is an image, or rather a 
concrete form of an internal vibration of the mind. 
The child begins to see the alphabet when he reads 
with it. Up to that time he simply draws images or 



i84 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

inwardly gazes at the semblance of the picture he in- 
tends to draw, but he does not read. As soon as the 
symbol is read, it becomes a word. That is why every 
spelling book presents the letters in the syllables and 
the syllables in the words. In this way they cease to 
be mere scrawls drawn on the paper, and become 
thoughts. They may be dim, vague, and mysterious; 
they may be sharply defined or they may blend and 
fuse into a suggestive haze; but they are in every given 
instance thoughts that are being awakened in the mind 
of the child. These thoughts have in them the power 
to develop, to organise themselves and become a dis- 
course. From the simple sentences and the nursery 
rhymes of the primer, they grow into an ever-richer 
significance. From the sowing to the harvesting, from 
the green stalk to the sturdy trunk, it is one life and 
one sole process. The mind that will soar over the 
dizzy heights of thought begins its flight in the humble 
lowlands. And it first becomes conscious of its power 
to rise, when the life of thought is awakened by the 
words of the spelling book. 

The moment the child begins reading, he must of 
necessity read something. There is no mere instru- 
ment without the material to which it is to be applied. 
The infant who opens his eyes and strives to look can- 
not but see something. The "picture," insignificant 
for the teacher, has its own special colouring for the 
child's mind. He fixes his gaze on it; he draws it 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 185 

within himself, cherishes it, and fosters it with his 
fancies. Such is the law of the spirit! It may be 
violated, but the consequences of transgression are 
commensurate with the majesty of this law. 

Grammars too, like spelling primers and rhetorics 
and logic and every kind of preceptive teaching, may 
be assumed as a form separated from its contents, as 
something empty and abstract. The child is taught 
for instance that the letter m in mamma does not be- 
long to that word (we call it a "word," and forget 
that to him at least it is not a word but his own 
mother) . That letter m, we tell him, is found in other 
words, mat, meat, etc. We show him that it is in all 
of them, and yet in none of them. We therefore can 
and must abstract it from all concrete connections, iso- 
late and fix it as that something which it is in itself 
— the letter m. In the same manner we abstract the 
rule of grammar from a number of individual examples. 
We exalt it over them, and give it an existence which 
is higher, and independent of theirs. And so for 
rhetoric, and so for logic. 

But in this process of progressive abstraction, in 
this practice of considering the abstract as something 
substantial, and of reducing the concrete and the par- 
ticular to the subordinate position of the accessory, life 
recedes and ebbs away. The differences between this 
and that word, between two images, two thoughts, two 
modes of thinking, of expressing, of behaving, at first 



i86 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

become slight, then negligible, then quite inexistent, 
and the soul becomes accustomed to the generic, to 
the empty, to the indifferent. It knows no longer how 
to fix the peculiarities of things, how to notice the dif- 
ferent traits of men's characters, their interests, their 
diverse values, until finally it becomes indifferent and 
sceptical. Words lose their meaning; they no longer 
smack of what they used to; their value is gone. 
Things lose their individuality, and men their physi- 
ognomies. This scepticism robs man of his own faith, 
of his character and personality. The fundamental 
aim of education ceases to exist. Abstract education 
is no education at all. It is not even instruction. For 
it does not teach the alphabet as it really exists, as 
something inseparable from the sound, and from the 
word, and from the human soul! All it gives is a new 
materialised and detached abstraction. 

The alphabet is real and concrete, not abstract; it 
is not a means but an end; it is not mere form but 
also content. It is not a weapon which man may wield 
indifferently either for good purposes or for evil mo- 
tives. It is man himself. It is the human soul, which 
should already flash in the very first word that is 
spelled, if it is read intelligently. And it ought to be 
a good word, worthy of the child and of the future 
man, a word in which the youthful pupil ought already 
to be able to discover himself, — not himself in general, 
but that better self which the school gradually and 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 187 

progressively will teach him to find within himself. 
So considered, the alphabet is a powerful instrument 
of human formation and of moral shaping. It is edu- 
cation. 

For this reason the school must have a library, and 
should adopt all possible means to encourage the habit 
and develop the taste of reading, since the word which 
truly expresses the soul of man is not that one word, nor 
the word of that one book. A word or a book will 
always be a mere fragment of life, and many of them 
therefore will be needed. Many, very many books, to 
satisfy the ever-growing needs of the child's mind! 
Books that will spur his thought constantly towards 
more distant goals, and his heart and imagination with 
it. Thus the child grows to be a man. 

Instruction then which is not education is not even 
instruction. It is a denuded abstraction, violently 
thrust like other abstractions into the life of the spirit 
where it generates that monstrosity which we have de- 
scribed as material culture, mechanical and devoid of 
spiritual vitality. That culture, being material, has no 
unity, is fragmentary, inorganic, capable of growing 
indefinitely without in any way transforming the re- 
cipient mind or becoming assimilated to the process of 
the personality to which it simply adheres extrinsically. 
This mechanical teaching is commensurate with things, 
and grows proportionately with them; but it has no 
intimate relation with the spirit. He who knows one 



i88 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

hundred things has not a greater nor a different in- 
tellectual value from him who knows ten, since the 
hundred and the ten are locked up in both in exactly 
the same way that two different sums of money are 
deposited in two different vaults. What merit is there 
in the safe which contains the greater sum? The merit 
would belong to the man who had accumulated the 
greater amount by a greater sum of labour, for it 
would then be commensurate with work, which is the 
developing process itself and the life of the human 
personality to which we must always have recourse 
when we endeavour to establish values. For as we 
have seen, nothing is, properly speaking, thinkable ex- 
cept in relation to the human spirit. 

Whether one reads a single book or an entire library, 
the result is the same, if what is read fails to become 
the life of the reader — his feelings and his thoughts, 
his passions and his meditation, his experience and the 
extolment of his personality. The poet Giusti has 
said: ''Writing a book is worse than useless, unless it 
is going to change people." Reading a book with no 
effect is infinitely worse. Of course the people that 
have to be transformed, both for the writer and for 
the reader (who are not two very different persons 
after all), are not the others, but first of all the author 
himself. The mere reading of a page or even a word 
inwardly reconstitutes us, if it does consist in a new 
throb of our personality, which continuously renews 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 189 

itself through the incessant vibrations of its becom- 
ing. This then is the all-important solution, — that the 
book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and 
set them in motion; that it transform itself into our 
inner life; that it cease to be a thing, special and de- 
terminate, one of the many, and become transfused into 
our personality. And our personality in its act, in the 
act, I say, and not in the abstract concept which we 
may somehow form of it, — is absolute unity: that mov- 
ing unity to which education can in no wise be re- 
ferred, unless it is made identical with its movement, 
and therefore entirely conformant to its unity. 

The man whose culture is limited, or, rather, entirely 
estranged from the understanding of life, is called 
homo unius libri. We might just as well call him homo 
omnium librorum. For he who would read all books 
need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of 
the daughters of Danaus, — a leak through which all 
ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all hopes, everything 
that man may find in books, would have to flow unceas- 
ingly, without leaving any traces of their passage, with- 
out ever forming that personality which, having ac- 
quired a certain form or physiognomy, reacts and be- 
comes selective, picks what it wants out of the con- 
geries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only 
what it requires for the life that is suited to it. We 
should never add books upon books ad infinitum! It is 
not a question of quantity. What we need is the ability 



I90 THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 

to discover our world in books, — that sum total of in- 
terests which respond to all the vibrations of our spirit, 
which assuredly, as Herbart claimed, has a multiplicity 
of interests, but all of them radiating from a vital 
centre. And everything is in the centre, since every- 
thing originates there. 

Education which strives to get at the centre of the 
personality, the sole spot whence it is possible to derive 
the spiritual value of a living culture, is essentially 
moral, and may never be hemmed in within the re- 
stricted bounds of an abstract intellectual training. 
There is in truth a kind of instruction which is not 
education; not because it is in no way educative, but 
because it gives a bad education and trains for evil. 
This realistic education, which is substantially mate- 
rialistic, extinguishes the sentiment of freedom in man, 
debases his personality, and stifles in him the living con- 
sciousness of the spirituality of the world, and conse- 
quently of man's responsibility. 

The antithesis between instruction and education is 
the antithesis between realistic and idealistic culture, 
or again, that existing between a material and a 
spiritual conception of life. If the school means 
conquest of freedom, we must learn to loathe the 
scrappiness of education, the fractioning tendency 
which presumes to cut off one part from the rest of 
the body, as if education, that is, personality, could 
have many parts. We must learn to react against a 



THE UNITY OF EDUCATION 191 

system of education which, conceiving its role to be 
merely intellectualistic, and such as to make of the 
human spirit a clear mirror of things, proceeds to an 
infinite subdivision to match the infinite multiplicity of 
things. Unity ought to be our constant aim. We 
should never look away from the living, that is, the 
person, the pupil into whose soul our loving solicitude 
should strive to gain access in order to help him create 
his own world. 



CHAPTER IX 

CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL 
EDUCATION 

The principle of educational unity which I have briefly 
tried to illustrate demands a further development in 
connection with the claims of physical culture. For 
after we have unified moral and intellectual discipline 
in the one concrete concept of the education of the 
spirit, whose activity cannot be cognitive without also 
being practical, and cannot realise any moral values 
except through cognition, it might yet seem that a com- 
plete and perfect system of education should aim at the 
physical development as well as at the spiritual. For 
the pupil is not solely mind. He has a body also; and 
these two terms, body and spirit, must be conceived in 
such close connection and in such intimate conjunction 
that the health of the one be dependent on the sound- 
ness of the other. 

Before elucidating this argument, we must voice our 
appreciation of the pedagogical principle by virtue of 
which the ancient Greeks developed their athletic edu- 
cation, and which since the Renaissance has for a dif- 
ferent motive been reintroduced into the theory of 
physical culture, — a theory which I do not at all op- 
pose, but rather intend to reaffirm on the grounds of 

192 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 193 

educational unity. This pedagogical principle evi- 
dently originated in the mode of considering the func- 
tion of the bodily organism in respect to the human 
mind, since every time we scrutinise the interest that has 
always guided men in the field of education, we find 
that at all times the aim of education has been the de- 
velopment of the mind. Nor could it have been other- 
wise; for whether or not in possession of a clear under- 
standing of his spiritual essence, man spontaneously 
presents himself and is valued as a personality, which 
affirms itself, speaks even though dumb, and says "I." 
Education begins as a relation between master and 
slave, between parent and children. The slave and the 
son are not supported and cared for — educated — as 
simple brutes, but as beings endowed with the same 
attributes as the master or the parent, beings who are 
therefore able to receive orders or instructions and 
build their will out of these, — the will which those in 
authority wish to be identical with their own. The 
superior commands and therefore demands; the in- 
ferior obeys by replying, and he replies in so far as 
he is a spiritual subject; and this reply will become 
gradually better in proportion as he more fully actual- 
ises that spiritual nature which the master wishes to 
be closely corresponding to his own. Philosophy, as 
well as naive and primitive mentality, considers man 
to be such in so far as he is conscious of what he does, 
of what he says, of what he thinks; and also in that he is 



194 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

able to present himself to others, because he has first 
been present to himself. 

Man is man in that he is self-consciousness. Even 
the despicable tyrant who brutally domineers over the 
wretch who is forced to submit to his overbearing 
arrogance, even he wants his slave to be intelligent, 
capable of guessing his thoughts, and refuses to con- 
sider him as an unconscious tool of his whims. The 
mother who tenderly nurses her sick child is indeed 
anxious for the health of the body over which she wor- 
ries, and she would like to see it vigorous and strong. 
But that body is so endeared to her, because by means 
of it the child is enabled to live happily with her; 
through it his fond soul can requite maternal love by 
filial devotion; or in it he may develop a powerful and 
beautiful personality worthy to be adored as the ideal 
creature of maternal affection. If in the bloom of 
physical health he were to reveal himself stupid and 
insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality and 
bestial appetites, this son would cease to be the object 
of his mother's fondness, nay, he would arouse in her 
a feeling of loathing and revulsion. It is this sense of 
loathing that we feel towards the brutes, to the extent 
that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, 
and that we also feel for the human corpse from which 
life has departed; for life is the basis of every psycho- 
logical relation, and therefore of every possible sym- 
pathy. 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 195 

Education is union, communion, inter-individual uni- 
fication; and unity is possible only because men spirit- 
ually convene. Matter, we have seen, nature, things, 
the non-spirit is multiplicity. As soon as the multi- 
plicity of natural elements begins to be organised, al- 
ready in their organism spiritual activity shines forth. 
In the spirit is the root and possibility of every unifi- 
cation. It is spirit that unites men. Education there- 
fore cannot be a social relationship and a link between 
men except by being a spiritual tie among human 
minds. Therefore it is now, and has at all times been, 
what it naturally ought to be, education of the spirit. 

But as we aim at the education of the spirit, we may 
or we may not take care of the body; or again we may 
take care of it in this or that way. It all depends on 
what conception we have of the spirit. The ancients 
made a great deal of physical culture, and the Greek 
philosophers of antiquity considered gymnastics to be 
the essential complement of music, including in music 
all forms of spiritual cultivation. The ancients never 
divided the spirit from the physical reality of man : man 
as a whole (body and psychic activity) was conceived 
by them as a natural being subject to the mechanism 
which regulates and controls nature. When Greek 
psychology fell under the influence of that mystic out- 
look which is peculiar to religious belief, the soul, which 
was opposed to the body, and which was looked upon as 
chained and emprisoned in the body, was sharply dis- 



196 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

tinguished from another soul. That other soul was 
kept in contact with the materiality of all natural 
things, and together with them was governed by the 
law of mechanical becoming, that is, of the transforma- 
tions caused by motion by which all the parts of 
matter are bestirred. This natural soul, susceptible of 
development, and capable of gradually rising to the 
height of the other, of the pure bodiless mind whose act 
is the contemplation of truth; this soul imbedded in the 
body, which does not therefore give to man a supernatu- 
ral being, but like all things of nature comes into the 
world, grows and dies, incessantly passing from one 
mode of being to another, this soul is the one that can 
and ought to be educated. The soul which results 
from the organic process of the physical body, and 
which in its development proceeds side by side with 
the transformations of the latter, could not be educated 
except in connection with the development and im- 
provement of the body. Human thought, which then 
had not yet secured the consciousness of its own ir- 
reducible opposition to nature, — the consciousness, in 
other words, of its own essential freedom, — seeing it- 
self immersed even as spiritual substance in the in- 
distinctness of nature, could not look upon education 
as upon a problem of freedom which can not admit of 
nature as limiting spiritual activity. It was accordingly 
reduced to conceive this activity, displayed in dealing 
with man, as being on the same plane with the 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 197 

other forms of activity which propose to deal with 
things of nature. In a pedagogical naturalism of this 
sort, the mind could not be the mind without also being 
body, and therefore had to include physical develop- 
ment in its own process. 

But with the advent of Christianity the spirit was 
sharply dissociated from nature. The original dual- 
ism of law of the spirit and law of the flesh, of grace 
and nature, rescued man at the very beginning from the 
tyranny of merely natural things, and announced a 
kingdom of the spirit which "is not of this world." 
And it is not in fact "of this world," if by world we 
mean what the word ordinarily implies, — the world 
which confronts us, and which we can point out to 
ourselves and to others; the world which, being the 
object of our experience, is the direct antithesis of 
what we are, subject of experience, free personality, 
spirit. Christian humanity. Man, in this Christian 
conception, in this opposition to nature and to the ex- 
perimental world, overcomes what within his own self 
still belongs to nature, subdues that part of him which 
because natural appears as the enemy of freedom and 
of the finality of the spirit; as the seducer and the 
source of guilty wiles which clip the wing of man's 
loftier aspirations and weigh him down into a beast- 
like subjection to instinct. He therefore tends to un- 
derrate physical education, and sacrifices it to the de- 
mands of the spirit. He does not completely neglect 



198 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

the question of the behaviour of man towards physical 
nature; he could not, since his very dualism is possible 
only on condition that he correlate the two terms of 
the opposition. But finding that his attempt to attain 
freedom and realise his spiritual destiny is thwarted 
by the natural impulses of the senses, in which the 
life of the body is made manifest, he decides to re- 
move these hindrances and to clear the way which 
leads to spiritual salvation. He does then take the body 
into consideration, but simply to check its instincts 
and control its sensuous appetites. By the discipline 
of self-mortification, under the guidance of an unbend- 
ing will, he subdues the flesh, and subjects it to the 
exigencies of the spirit. 

Evidently this subduing discipline is still physical 
exercise, but in its own way. The haircloth of St. Fran- 
cis corresponds in fact to the club of Hercules, and 
serves the same purpose. The monsters which are 
knocked down by the weapon which Hercules alone 
could wield torment the saint of Assisi also; only, they 
are within him. He even tames the wolf, but without 
club or chains, by the mere exercise of'his gentle meek- 
ness. These internal monsters are not, properly speak- 
ing, in the material body. If they were, the Saint would 
not need to worry about them any more than about 
the earth under his feet or the sack on his shoulder. 
But they are in that body which he feels; they are in 
that soul which, with the violence of its desires, the 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 199 

din of its harsh and fiercely discordant voices, distracts 
him from the ideal where his life is. They are in that 
soul which thrusts so many claims on him, that were 
he to satisfy them he would have to part company 
with his Lady Poverty, and become once more the slave 
of things which are not in his power, — of wealth, which 
heaps up and blows away; of Fortune, which comes 
as a friend and departs as an enemy. He would, in 
other words, return to a materialistic conception of 
life. His Lernaean hydra is in the depths of his heart, 
where hundred-headed instinct, with its hundred 
mouths, tears the roots of his holy and magnanimous 
will, eager to resemble the Saviour in love and self- 
sacrifice. 

This monster is strangled with the haircloth, when 
the body is hardened and trained to self-denial, to suf- 
fering, to the repression of all animal passions which 
would keep man away from his goal. This discipline, 
far from debilitating the body, gives it a new strength, 
an endurance which enables man to live on a higher 
plane than he would if he followed natural impulses. 
For this more difficult manner of living, a robustness 
and a hardihood are requisite which are beyond the 
natural means of the body. The system of physical 
culture which gives this stupendous endurance is 
called asceticism. 

But this system is an abstract one. Man's life is not 
poverty, since it is work and therefore wealth. And 



200 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

the mind with its freedom cannot be conceived of as 
antagonistic to nature. For as body and as sense, in 
so far as we exist and know of our existence, we 
belong to this nature. Antagonism and duality import 
the limitation of each of the opposed terms and ex- 
clude freedom which is not to be found within fixed 
limits; for freedom, as we have said, means infini- 
tude. 

The spirit is free only if infinite. It cannot have 
any obstructing barrier in its path. It can be con- 
ceived as freedom only after it has overcome dualism, 
and when in nature itself and in the body we see the 
effect of the activity of the spirit. It has no need 
therefore of walls within which it might feel the neces- 
sity of cloistering itself in the effort to renounce the 
outer world. This is not the way to conquer freedom. 
A liberty won under such conditions would always 
be insecure, constantly threatened, always beleaguered, 
and therefore a mere shadow of freedom. The spirit, 
if it is free, that is, if it is spirit, must be conterminous 
with thought, it must extend its sway as far as there 
is any sign of life to the last point where a vestige of 
being can be revealed to it. Nothing thinkable can 
be external to it. Whatever presents itself to it, 
whether in the garb of an enemy or under the cloak 
of friendship, can only be one of its creatures, which 
it has placed at its own side, or in front of itself, or 
against itself. 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 201 

This new pedagogical and philosophical view, first 
disclosed to Humanism, then enlightened by the genius 
of the Italian Renaissance, appears now to us in the 
full light of modern thought. Superficially it might 
seem identical with the classical and naturalistic out- 
look. In reality, however, it has made its way back 
to it only in order to confirm and integrate the concept 
of Christian spiritualism and to bring out its truth. 
Greek athletics is the training of the body as an end 
in itself: it surely serves the cause of the spirit, but 
only in so far as the spirit is grafted on the trunk of 
the physical personality, and to the extent that it is 
able to absorb all its vital sap, thereby subjecting itself 
to generation and decay, the common destiny of all 
natural beings. The physical culture of the ancients 
is spiritual discipline, only to the extent that for them 
the mind too is essentially body. Modern physical edu- 
cation, at least from the time of Vittorino da Feltre, 
is spiritual formation of the body: it is bodily training 
for the benefit of the spirit, just as the mediaeval ascetic 
would have it; but of a spirit which does not intend to 
bury itself in abstract self-seclusion away from the 
existential world, of a spirit which passing beyond the 
cloister walls soars over the realm of nature, induing 
it and subduing it instrumentally to its ends and as a 
mirror of its will. So that for moderns, too, physical 
culture is spiritual education, but for the reason that 
to us the body itself is spirit. Our science is not 



202 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

merely a speculation of ultra-mundane truths, but 
rather a science of man and of man in the Universe, 
and therefore also of this nature which is dominated 
and spiritualised by becoming known, in the same 
way that every book that is read is spiritualised. 

This concrete notion of a spirit which excludes noth- 
ing from itself gives concreteness to the Christian con- 
ception of physical discipline. For it aims to turn the 
body into an obedient tool of the will, not however of 
that will which renounces the world, but of that will 
which turns to the world as to the field where its battles 
are fought and won; to the world which it transforms 
by its work, constantly re-creating it, now modifying 
one part and now another, but always acting on the 
entire system, and renewing it as a whole in the inti- 
mate organic connection and interdependence of these 
parts; to the world which forever confronts it in a 
rebellious and challenging attitude, and which it labori- 
ously subdues and turns into a mirror of its own be- 
coming. 

Modern idealism and ancient naturalism both em- 
phasise, though for opposite motives, the importance 
of a positive education in distinction to the negative 
discipline inculcated by mediaeval asceticism. We said 
that to-day we develop the body because the body is 
spirit. This proposition runs counter to common 
sense. But common sense as such cannot be respected 
by the thinker unless he first transforms its content. 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 203 

Our body, we must remember, is not one body out of 
many. If it were actually mixed with and lost in 
the multitude of material things which surround it, we 
could no longer speak of any bodies. For all bodies, 
as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they 
modify ours and are somehow related to it. Or to put 
it in a different and perhaps better way, all other bodies, 
which we possess as contents of our experience, form 
a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this 
centre is our body. These first of all occupy space, but 
a space which no one of us can think of or intuit 
otherwise than as a radiating infinity, the centre of 
which we occupy with our body. So that before we can 
speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. It is 
the foundation and groundwork of all bodies. Justly, 
therefore, the immanent sense, profound and contin- 
uous, which we have of our body, and whose modi- 
fications constitute all our particular sensations, was 
called the fundamental sentiment by our Italian phi- 
losopher Rosmini. For our body is ours only in so 
far as we feel it; and we feel it, at first, confusedly or 
rather indistinctly, without discerning any differen- 
tiated part. We feel it as the limit, the other, the op- 
posite, the object of our consciousness, which, were it 
not conscious of something (of itself as of something), 
would not be consciousness, would not realise itself. 
And it realises itself, in the first place, as consciousness 
of this object which is the body. Accurately, there- 



204 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

fore, was the body defined by Spinoza as objectum 
mentis, as object of consciousness. Objectless con- 
sciousness is not consciousness; and it is likewise ob- 
vious that the object of consciousness cannot be such 
without consciousness. 

The two terms are inseparable, for the reason that 
they are produced simultaneously by one and the same 
act, from which they cannot be detached and this act 
is the free becoming of the spirit. 

Our body, this first object of consciousness, as yet 
indistinct and therefore one and infinite, is not really 
in space, the realm of the distinct, of the multiple, of 
the finite. It is within our own consciousness. And 
it is only by recalling this inwardness that we are able 
to understand how it happens that we ("We" — spiritual 
activity) act upon our body, animating it, sustaining 
it, endowing it with our vigorous and buoyant vitality; 
constantly transforming it, in very much the same way 
that we act on what we easily conceive to be our moral 
personality. As we direct our thoughts, and bringing 
them out of the dark into the luminous setting of our 
consciousness, submit them to scrutiny and correction, 
to elimination and selection; when we stifle or feed 
the fire of our passions; when we cherish ideals, nour- 
ish them with our own life's blood, and sustain them 
with our unbending resolve ; and again when we quench 
them in the fickleness of our whims, are we not con- 
stantly creating and variously reshaping our spiritual 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 205 

life, making it good or bad, that is, eagerly and scrupu- 
lously intent on the quest of Truth or slothfuUy plunged 
in ignorance and forgetfulness? 

But our body, this inseparable companion, which is 
our own self, is no particular limb, which as such 
might be removed from us. We remain what we are, 
even though mutilated. Each part of our organism 
is ours, in that it is fused in the sole and indistin- 
guishable totality of our living being, — our heart and 
our brain, as well as the phalanx of a fmger, if per- 
chance we should be unable to live without it, and it 
therefore effectively constituted our being. The dis- 
tinction between organs that are vital and organs that 
are not is an empirical one, and relative to an observa- 
tion which is true within the limits of ordinary occur- 
rence. 

If our body is the body which we perceive as ours, 
it is this one or that one in accordance with our per- 
ception; and this perception certainly is not arbitrary, 
but our own, subjective, to the point that, in an ab- 
normal way, one may cease to be in possession of his 
body and thus to be no longer able to live in conse- 
quence of the loss of a finger, or even of a hair. This 
hair then is a vital part, not because it is a hair, but 
because it has been, insanely if you will, assumed and 
absorbed in the distinct unity of our body. 

I shall try to make my thought clearer by the use 
of an example. The organ of organs, as a great 



2o6 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

writer once said, is the hand, and we can look at it 
from two quite distinct points of view. We may place 
our hand on a table by the side of other hands, the 
hands of persons sitting around us. We see its shape, 
its colour, its size, etc.; we compare it with the others, 
and we almost forget it is ours, because then we do 
not, in act, distinguish it from the remaining ones. In 
these circumstances, it is evident that our hand is 
in our consciousness as a material object, separated 
from every essential relationship with us — with us as 
we are in the act of looking and comparing. This is 
the external point from which we may view our hand. 
But there is another one: the hand that picks up the 
pen as we are about to write is truly our hand, the 
instrument of which we avail ourselves in order to ply 
another tool which is needed for our work. In these 
circumstances our right hand, instead of being for us 
one in the midst of many, as it was in the case previ- 
ously considered, is ours, the only one which we can 
possibly use, as we endeavour to carry out our inten- 
tion of writing, which intention is our will to realise 
our personality in that determined way, since doing a 
thing always means realising that personality of ours 
which does that thing. Our hand in this case coalesces 
so completely with our being that without it — the hand 
already trained to write — we could not be ourselves. 
Abstractly, to be sure, we should be ourselves. But 
it is the same story over again. What exists is not 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 207 

the abstract but the concrete. And in the concrete, we, 
who are about to write, are this determined personality, 
in which our will flows into the hand; and just as 
we could not in truth distinguish our Self from our 
will (we being nothing more and nothing less than this 
will of ours), in the same way it would be impossible 
to distinguish between "us" and our hand, between our 
will and our hand. Since the hand now wields the 
pen, having perfected its instrumentality by means of 
this latter, our will no longer leans upon and termi- 
nates in the hand, but it flows on and presses into 
the point of the pen itself, through which, if neither 
ink nor paper offers resistance, it empties into the 
stream of writing. This writing which is read is 
Thought, whereby the writer finds himself at the end in 
front of his own thinking, that is, in front of himself; 
that self, which, considering the act materially, he 
seemed to be leaving further and further behind, 
whereas in reality he was penetrating into it more and 
more deeply. But in such a case and by the act itself, 
can we effectively distinguish between thought, arm, 
hand, writing material, the written page, that same page 
when read, and the new thought? It is a circle made 
up of contiguous points, without gaps or interruptions. 
It is one sole process, wherein in consequence of a 
particular organisation of our personality, we place 
ourselves in front of ourselves, and thus realise our- 
selves. The hand is ours because it is not distinguished 



208 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

from us, nor, consequently, from the remaining limbs 
of our body nor from its material surroundings. 

This, our hand, knows how to write because we have 
learned how to write: in exactly the same way that 
our heart knows how to love, to dare and renounce, 
by striving earnestly to see ourselves in others, to 
repress the instinctive timidity of excessive prudence, 
and to break the force of desire prompted by natural 
egoism. We are then what we want to be; not merely 
in our passions and ideas, but in our limbs too, to the 
extent that their being depends from their functions, 
and their functions can be regulated by hygiene and ex- 
ercise, which are our action and our will. 

There is, of course, a natural datum which we cannot 
modify, which we have to accept as a basis for further 
construction. But this limitation, imposed on the truths 
I mentioned above, must be accepted without in any 
way renouncing the truth itself, and should be under- 
stood by virtue of both its scientific and moral values. 
This warning is not merely helpful in connection with 
the question now before us, but will always prove 
useful on account of its bearing on the many problems 
which arise from a spiritualistic conception of life and 
cause shiftless philosophasters to shy and balk. It is 
true that there is a body which we did not give to our- 
selves, which therefore is not a product of our spirit, 
nor part of its life and substance, but only if we think 
of the body of the individual, empirically considered 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 209 

as such. In this sense I am not self-produced. The 
son can ascribe to his parents the imperfection that 
mars his whole existence, whatever kind of life he 
may decide to lead. The man who was born blind 
may blame his affliction upon cruel nature. But the 
child who calls his parents to account, and the man 
who complains of nature, is man as a particular; he 
is one of many men, one of the animals, one of the 
beings, one of the infinite things wielded by Man (that 
man to whom we must always refer, when we wish to 
recall that even if the world is not all spirit, there is 
at least a little corner therein set aside for it) ; he is 
one of the infinite things which Man gathers and uni- 
fies in his own thought because he is thought. The 
particular man is man as he is being thought, who 
refers us to the thinking man as to the true man. 
This true man is also an individual, not as a part but 
as the whole, and comprehends all within itself. 
And in this man, parents and children are the same 
man. In it men and nature are, likewise, one and 
the same, man or spirit in its universality. We (each 
one of us) are one and the other of these men; but 
we are one of them, the smaller one, only in that we 
are the other one, the larger one, and we ought not to 
expect the small to take the place of the large and 
to act in his stead. All our errors and all our sins 
are caused by substituting one in place of the other. 
And what is more, the large, the all embracing, the 



2IO CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

infinite, is present in the small with all his infinitude. 
Personality as such, in its actuality, does not shrink 
and restrict itself to the singular and particular man. 
Within those boundaries which are only visible from 
the outside, it internally expatiates to infinity, absorbing 
in itself and surmounting all limitations. The man born 
blind does not know the marvels and the wondrous 
beauties of nature which gladden the eyes and the soul 
of the seeing man. But his soul pours out none the 
less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. 
And the blind man who once saw, in the consciousness 
of his sightlessness, cherishes the boundless image of 
the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely by 
the aid of the imagination. He even heals the wounds 
and soothes the pain of blindness by making it objective 
through reflection; and the personahty, at any event, 
always victoriously breaks out of the narrow cell in 
which it might seem to be confined. So that in the 
depths of even the gloomiest dungeon a ray of light 
always peers through, to lighten and comfort the soul 
of man in misery, and to restore to him the entire and 
therefore infinite liberty of creating for himself a world 
of his own. 

We can therefore say that man, he that lives — not 
the one which is seen from the outside, but the think- 
ing and the willing man, who is a personality in the 
act — ^never submits to a nature which is not his own. 
He shapes his own nature, beginning with his body, 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 211 

and gradually from it magnifying the effect of his 
power, and crowding the environing space, which is 
his, with the creatures he gives life to. We must not 
consider the smaller man whom we see confined to a 
few square feet and at the mercy of the passing in- 
stant. We must intently look upon that other one 
who has done and still continues to do all the beautiful 
things on which we thrive, on that one who is human- 
ity, the spirit. We must consider his power, which 
is thought and work (work, that is, as thought) ; and 
ponder over this material world in which we live, all 
blocked out, as it is, measured, and traversed by forces 
which we bridle, accumulate and release, at pleasure, 
— this world which has been altered from its former 
state, and has been made as we now see it fit for 
human habitation, which has been joined to us, as- 
similated to our life, spiritualised. When we have 
done all this we shall see how impossible it is to dis- 
connect nature from the spirit, and to think the former 
without the latter. Nature may be dissociated from 
the natural man, that is, one of its parts may be isolated 
from the remainder. But such man of nature is not 
the one who rules over nature: he is not Volta who 
clutches the electric current and transforms tiie earth; 
he is not Michel Angelo who transfigures marble and 
creates the Moses. 

Physical education, then, is not superadded to the 
education of the spirit, but is itself education of the 



212 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

spirit. It is the fundamental part of this education, 
in as much as the body is, in the sense we have used 
the words, the seat of our spiritual personality. Living 
means constructing one's own body, because living is 
thinking, and thinking is self-consciousness; but this 
consciousness is possible only if we make it objective, 
and the object as such is the body (our body). For 
as consciousness is, so is the body. There is no think- 
ing which is not also doing. Thinking not only builds 
up the brain, but the rest of the body besides. We may 
call it will, but then there is not one single act of 
thought which is not the mental activity indicated by 
this word "will." Without will we should have no bod- 
ily substance, in as much as the body is always and 
primarily life, and living is impossible without willing. 
What are called involuntary movements are not really 
such; they differ from the so-called voluntary in that 
they are constant, immanent, so much so that we can 
after all interrupt them. Without the exercise of our 
will we could never hold ourselves erect and keep our 
feet, but would forever be stumbling and falling; unless 
we willed it, the power which keeps every organ in 
its place, and maintains all the organs in the circle of 
life, would be annihilated. Therefore morale, as they 
say, is a very considerable aid in curing the diseases 
of the body. It is on this account that societies and 
religious sects have arisen which make of moral faith 
an instrument of physical well-being. For the same 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 213 

reason, also, it is impossible for the psychiatrists to 
draw a line separating mental troubles from bodily 
ailments. The force of the will, the vigour of the per- 
sonality, the impulse of the spirit in its becoming, this 
is the wondrous power which galvanises matter and 
organically quickens it; which sustains life, equips it, 
and fits it for its march towards ever renewed, ever 
improved finalities. It is not temperament which is 
the basis of character, but character which is the basis 
of temperament. If we reverse this proposition, every 
moral conception of life becomes absurd, and every 
spiritual value appears ineffectual. Don Abbondio then 
ceases to be wrong, and Cardinal Federico Borromeo 
is no longer right. 

Character too is an empirical concept, and like all 
such concepts, it has a truthfulness which is not clearly 
discernible, but dimly visible. Character signifies 
rational personality, using the term rationality to mean, 
not the movement or the becoming which belongs 
peculiarly to reason as the form of spiritual activity, 
but the coherence of the object on which this activity 
is fixed, which coherence in turn consists in the har- 
mony whereby it is possible to think all the parts of 
objective thought as forming a single whole, in that 
there is no conflict or contradiction among them, and 
in as much as the object remains always the same 
throughout all these particulars. If in the course of 
reasoning we introduce conflicting statements which 



214 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

cannot possibly be referred to the same thing, we cannot 
be said to reason. Rationality is the permanence of 
the being of which we think: it is firmness of concep- 
tion, stability of a law which we apply to all particu- 
lars that come under its sway. For the object of con- 
sciousness is characterised, in respect to the act which 
constitutes it, by this stability and immutability. What 
we think is that and no other, whereas thought, by 
which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous 
change. 

But the character of man is in the object, in the 
contents of his thought, in what he gradually builds 
himself up to, in the determined personality which he 
constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, in his body. 
But body, be it remembered, in an idealistic sense, 
body as a system, forming, with its law and its con- 
figuration, the solid basis of every ulterior develop- 
ment. This truth, vaguely accepted by common sense, 
which looks upon a strong constitution as a prelim- 
inary to a sound character, will appear in its full light 
only after it has been stripped of the fantastic and 
material attributes which it receives from a realistically 
vulgar way of conceiving the body materially. For it 
is evident that a feeble and sickly man may yet have 
a steel-like character. Farinata, who stands "erect 
with breast and brow," as though he held Hell in con- 
tempt; Giordano Bruno, who amidst the flames that 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 215 

already consume his flesh disdainfully turns his eyes 
from the symbol of the religion which had thrust him 
on the stake, are evident examples of a strength of 
mind with no relation to their physical powers, which 
were already destroyed or about to be scattered by an 
irresistible might. Leopardi is right when he scorn- 
fully protests that his ill health is not the cause of 
that sad pessimism which in his mind solemnly chal- 
lenges "the unseemly hidden Power." 

Character is physical robustness to the extent that 
this latter is spiritual haleness, and in so far as it is 
compact, firm, steadfast thought. Thought in this re- 
spect appears externally as body, not subject to the 
hostile forces that perpetually beset it from without 
and from within; and on account of the intrinsic spir- 
ituality of its substance, it is a law rather than a fact, 
and a process or a tendency rather than a fixed and 
established manner of being. For organic endurance, 
which is really what we mean by health, does not 
consist in muscular development or in the bloom of an 
exuberant constitution, but rather in an indwelling 
power, in dynamically persistent and tenacious strug- 
gle and adaptation, in the capacity of self-preservation, 
of self-affirmation, which is the specific essence of 
spiritual being. 

This body, in which thought organises and consoli- 
dates itself; this body, by means of which thought is 



2i6 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

enabled to press on its vigorous development, reab- 
sorbing in its actual present the past accomplishment, 
and to proceed on its ascent, scaling the height step 
by step, never sliding downward, because every grade 
it builds remains as a firm support of the next one; — 
this is man's character, which is not an attribute 
of the will considered as practical activity in contra- 
distinction to theoretic activity. Character is an at- 
tribute of the spirit qua spirit, without any adjectives. 
We may, if we will, distinguish the practical from the 
theoretical man, the soundness of the will from intel- 
lectual originality. But just as it is not possible to 
conceive of a really fruitful and constructive practical 
activity without that coherence of design and self-sup- 
porting volitional continuity which constitute char- 
acter, in the same way intelligence and ingenuity will 
not become manifest without firmness of purpose, 
without persevering reflection and study of the object, 
and without stability of this object of intellectual 
activity, which again constitute character. If character 
is set as the basis of morality, then every science and 
every form of culture, even those which aim at evil, con- 
sidered in themselves, as the life of the intelligence 
must have a moral value, must be governed by an 
inviolable law. By spiritual steadfastness, which is 
the condition of spiritual productivity, man sacrifices 
himself to an ideal and constitutes his moral person- 
ality, whether he die for his country or whether he 



CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 217 

labour to bring light amid his thoughts. Life in all its 
phases is the untiring fulfilment of duty. 

To conclude then, physical education must be en- 
couraged, but as spiritual training and as formation of 
character. Gymnastic exercise, therefore, far from 
being the only way to this end, may even lead in the 
opposite direction; and it will do so as long as it is 
considered apart from the remainder of education, with 
a particular scope of its own, and with heterogeneous 
contents in respect to spiritual education properly so- 
called. The teacher of physical education must always 
bear in mind that he is not dealing with bodies, bodies 
to be moved around, to be lined up, or rushed around 
a track. He too is training souls, and collaborates 
with all the other teachers in the moral preparation 
and advancement of mankind. If, in addition to his 
special qualifications, he does not possess culture 
enough to enable him to discern the spirit beyond the 
body, and to understand therefore the moral value of 
order, of precision, of gracefulness, of agility, by which 
man externally realises his personality, he will no doubt 
fulfil the ordinary demands of physical culture, but 
he will just as certainly antagonise and disgust those 
of his pupils who are most highly gifted and other- 
wise better trained, and he can therefore lay no claim 
to the title of educator. 

Education then is either one or not effective. The 
assumption that there are many kinds of education 



2i8 CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION 

leads to very disastrous results. Education is one; 
and as a whole it appears unchanged in each one of 
the parts that we ordinarily distinguish in it, accord- 
ing as we approach the human spirit now from one side 
and now from the other. 



CHAPTER X 
THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

ART AND RELIGION 

We have shown in the previous chapters the necessity 
of rigorously maintaining the unity of education, of re- 
sisting every attempt at separation, of opposing all 
systems which treat the various parts of education as 
though they could be kept distinct in practice and 
theory. There still remains a question which naturally 
arises at this juncture, and which we must try to 
answer. For true it is, some one might say, that 
moral and intellectual education are one and the same 
thing, and true it may be that education of the mind 
and culture of the body work for the same results; and 
it may also be admitted that education being forma- 
tion, or development, that is, the becoming of the 
spirit, and the spirit consisting in its becoming or 
rather in becoming pure and simple, it follows that 
education means spirit and nothing more. But grant- 
ing all this, was it really worth while? When we 
have attained this notion of the unity which is always 
the same, no matter under how many aspects it may 
present itself, what have we gained? Have we here 
anything more than a word? One says "spirit," an- 

219 



220 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

other might say "God," or "nature," or "matter," or 
some such thing, and there would not be much differ- 
ence. It might well be that in the course of the 
inquiry into the attributes of the spirit, a way was 
found to invest our word with quite a different mean- 
ing; but still, after we have defined and distinguished 
the concept of the spirit from all the others, we have 
not progressed much. We may have the satisfaction 
of continuing to see before us this concept, v/ith no 
possibility of ever ridding ourselves of its presence, 
but how much will we know of the contents that this 
spirit is supposed to have? What are the principles 
that should govern this education, which has been 
clearly stated to be not a natural fact, but a free 
action, and therefore a selection enlightened by con- 
sciousness, by reflection, and by reason? 

This suggested objection is not a purely imaginary 
one. Very often superficial critics, forgetting that 
pedagogical problems pertain to philosophy and are 
therefore problems of the spirit, awkwardly try to 
solve them by the insufficient light of common sense. 
In so doing they warn us that in idealistic pedagogics 
all particular and definite concepts vanish, and what 
remains is a vague confused indistinctness of no prac- 
tical utility to the teacher. 

And truly, if the only result obtained by idealistic 
pedagogics were the demonstration that many concepts, 
ordinarily considered to be substantially different, are 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 221 

in reality identical, we should not hesitate to call such 
philosophical knowledge useless and ridiculous. But 
in the first place we must notice that this assumed 
deficiency charged against us has partially been shown 
to be non-existent by the exposition of our doctrine, 
which reduces education to free spiritual becoming, 
and resolves the apparent multiplicity of educational 
forms in the immultiplicable unity of this becoming, 
outside of which nothing is truly conceivable. 

For the defect of our system was assumed in con- 
nection with an exigency which divides itself into two 
parts, respectively corresponding to the form and to 
the matter of education. For many of the pedagogical 
errors which we have pointed out were seen to be 
imputable, not to the choice of an unsuitable content 
of education, but to the criterion adopted in treating 
this content. I have already spoken of my disin- 
clination to accomplish a mere negative task; and in 
the last chapter, while denouncing the materialistic 
conception of physical education, I certainly did not 
spare the ascetic view which knows of no body other 
than the one which harasses the spirit and hinders its 
progress toward the ultimate good; and thereupon I 
tried to show that physical culture is spiritual edu- 
cation endowed with that self-same nature which be- 
longs to education when considered as formation of 
the will and of the intellect. But this does not mean 
that our thesis reduces itself to a mere theoretic trans- 



222 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

valuation or to a new abstract interpretation of our 
present educative system, which however in practice 
could not be affected by this purely theoretical dif- 
ference of interpretation. I tried to make it clear 
that our conception is not devoid of practical import, 
and that it does lead to a reform in education and 
to a new orientation of the school. This was espe- 
cially brought out in connection with physical culture 
in the preceding chapter, when I insisted on the neces- 
sity that physical instructors be trained in such a way 
that their mental equipment shall not be limited to 
notions that refer exclusively to the body in its physical 
limitations: but that in addition to physiology, anat- 
omy, and hygiene, they be made familiar also with 
those studies and disciplines that are more intimately 
connected with character, with the soul, and with the 
mind. 

But besides this, our entire investigation dealing with 
the reasons for an absolutely spiritualistic conception 
of education should have made it very clear that it is 
not possible to entertain these new conceptions with- 
out introducing in the school a new spirit, which will 
not yield to the realistic vogue and to the materialistic, 
pedantic, old-fashioned education, — a spirit which will 
bring before us a new duty in every instant of our 
teaching life and in every word we utter, and which 
will impress us with the necessity of acting differently 
from what has been taught by the followers of tra- 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 223 

ditional pedagogical routine. Whatever the subject 
may be, the form of education has to be in accord 
with something that should by now be the common 
possession of us all, namely, the consciousness of the 
intimate spirituality and of the sacred freedom of our 
work, which operates not in the material schools but 
within the souls of our pupils. There it gives rise 
not to incidents that are unessential to that greater 
world which is the aim of our religiously serious out- 
look on life, but to a process in which All is involved. 
The speculative side then of this form of education is 
not a useless and abstract theory, but a necessary mo- 
ment of the moral improvement, of the spiritual en- 
hancement, and of the general regeneration of teaching. 
Indifference to this reform, and the belief that men may 
continue to educate without bothering with the subtle 
problems of philosophy, mean a failure to understand 
the precise nature of education. 

But the question of the content of education is a 
different one. Having identified education with spirit- 
ual reality itself, it follows that the two determinations 
of the content of the latter belong to the content 
of the former. One of these determinations is his- 
torical in character; it advances as the history of the 
human mind progresses, assuming now this and now 
that aspect in accordance with the prevailing spiritual 
interests. We who have censured the conception of 
pre-established programmes, as being most dangerous 



224 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

prejudices of pedagogical realism, could not very well 
presume to determine here in the abstract, the content 
of every possible form of education for all places and 
all times. The school, like every other form of edu- 
cation, develops; and as it grows, it constantly changes 
its content, which again is nothing else than the content 
that the spirit gives to itself at every moment of its 
concrete development. 

It would be just as irrational to expect a school to 
map out with precision the limits and the scope of a 
pupil's culture. Of all the culture carved out for him 
at school, a boy will absorb only that much which is 
taken up by the autonomous growth of his personality. 
This will be supplemented and integrated by the cul- 
ture which he gets outside of the classroom, in all 
possible walks of life, and will be so personal and of 
such a character as to admit of no prevision or pre- 
determination even on the part of the learner himself. 
Away with pre-established programmes then of any 
description! Spiritual activity works only in the 
plenitude of freedom. Horace asks: Currente rota cur 
urceus exit? We answer: Whether an urceus or not, 
what always comes from the rota is something which 
cannot be foreseen, for the very simple reason that 
what is foreseen is not the future but the past, which 
we (as in the case of experimental sciences) project 
into the future, whereas the spirit is a creation which 
occurs not in time but in a never-setting present. 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 225 

So every abstract discussion of the possible content 
of education in general, or of any given particular 
school, must appear crude and absurd, if we recall that 
education reflects the historical development of the 
spirit. What we need to do is to wait, observe, and 
have faith. For God will reveal himself to us; and 
God is the very Spirit of ours which at every moment 
prescribes its law to itself and thus determines its own 
content. 

The other of the two determinations mentioned 
above is the ideal, or, as we perhaps might more pre- 
cisely call it, the transcendental. It pertains to that 
spiritual content which never changes as it passes 
through the various historical determinations, and 
which might therefore be styled the ''determiner of the 
intrinsic and absolute essence of the spirit." This con- 
tent upon careful consideration reveals itself as form, 
and more precisely as the form of the historically 
determined content of the spirit; or again as the con- 
creteness of that form which has been attributed to 
the spirit considered in itself, which is a becoming. 
But qua becoming, and irrespective of all special as- 
pects with which it historically configures itself, the 
spirit has already a content of its own, which cannot 
be absent from any of its historical configurations. 
In them this content will manifest itself over and over 
again, but constantly modified by the changes that are 
being historically produced. Under these varying 



226 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

modes and presentations it permanently abides as the 
indefectible substance of the spirit. This substance, 
this ideal spirit which becomes actual in history, can- 
not be ignored by any kind of pedagogics which aspires 
to a thorough knowledge of the essence of education. 

Having thus formulated the problem, and clinging 
firmly to the principle of educational unity, we may 
distinguish the forms of education which proceed from 
the ideal content of the spirit. But we must always 
keep in mind that, as these forms are only distinguish- 
able ideally, they can in no way be effectively sep- 
arated, and must be found in every concrete educative 
act. So that their synthesis and their complete im- 
manence is the concreteness of educational unity in its 
opposition to what I have called fragmentary education. 
Our distinction then will turn out to be an exact logical 
analysis, which analyses only the terms of a synthesis 
and cannot therefore be dissociated from the synthesis. 
By analysing and by synthesising, by determining the 
spiritual unity without disconnecting or in any way dis- 
sociating its intrinsic ideal determinations, we strive to 
represent the ideal of education. 

In making a rapid survey of this analysis, I must refer 
back to what was said of the attributes of the spirit, — 
that the spirit is in that it becomes, that it becomes in 
so far as it acquires self-consciousness, that its being 
therefore is consciousness in the act of being acquired. 
This act is surely self-consciousness, and it does mean 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 227 

cognition, but a cognition which differs from all others 
in that it has for its object that very one who cognises. 
And this is the meaning of "I/' identity of subject and 
object, — an identity, however, that because of its cu- 
rious nature needs to be carefully examined. It was 
shown in a preceding chapter that two things, to be 
thought as two, must yet be thought as one by virtue 
of the unique relationship which makes their duality 
possible. Here we observe the inverse: identity of 
subject and object means that in addition to the sub- 
ject there is — nothing; it means therefore unity. And 
yet this unity would in no manner be intelligible if 
it were not also a duality, if, in other words, the 
identity of subject and object were not also the dif- 
ference between them. 

To distinguish A from B, an initial, elementary 
minimum difference is required. It is the difference, 
called otherness, by which B is other than A. With- 
out this otherness there would not be A and B, but 
either A alone or B alone. The subject as it knows 
itself is certainly not another from the subject alone. 
But if it did not become other to itself, if it were 
not object also, as well as subject, it would never know 
itself. To be object as well as subject implies the 
necessity of distinguishing these two terms, and shows 
that there is otherness between them. If it sounds 
harsh to speak of something that first is "one" and 
then is "two" we might state the situation in a dif- 



228 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

ferent and perhaps simpler way. We might say that 
the subject would not know itself, if remaining always 
that one and selfsame subject, it were not both subject 
and object to itself. 

Consciousness implies this self-alteration of the sub- 
ject, which by placing itself as an object in front of 
itself realises itself, it being real only as self-conscious- 
ness. This is the import of the identity of the two 
terms, subject and object; or of the difference intrinsic 
to the one, which is but another way of stating it. We 
may insist as much as we want on the identity of the 
"I," but it will always be true that this "I" is real 
only in virtue of its intrinsic difference. And con- 
versely we may insist, as it is more often done, on the 
difference between the subjective moment of the "I," 
whereby the "I" is set in opposition to all its objects, 
and the objective moment in which the ego vanishes. 
But behind the difference, identity is always to be 
found. Man, the more he thinks, the more he alters 
himself, the more objective that reality becomes which 
he realises by self-consciousness, the more fully he sees 
the variation, the development, the growth, the en- 
hancement of the object — the world he knows. 

The spirit's being is its alteration. The more it is, 
— that is, the more it becomes, the more it lives, — the 
more difficult it is for it to recognise itself in the 
object. It might therefore be said that he who in- 
creases his knowledge also increases his ignorance, if 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 229 

he is unable to trace this knowledge back to its origin, 
and if the spirit's rally does not induce him to redis- 
cover himself at the bottom of the object, which has 
been allowed to alter and alienate itself more and more 
from the secret source of its own becoming. Thus it 
happens, as was said of old, that ''He that increaseth 
knowledge increaseth sorrow." All human sorrow pro- 
ceeds from our incapacity to recognise ourselves in the 
object, and consequently to feel our own infinite liberty. 

Subject then and object, and in their synthesis, in 
their living unity, the spirit, which therefore is neither 
a subject standing against an object, nor its opposite. 
The two terms, each one for itself, isolated, are equiv- 
alent. But every time human thought has isolated 
them, whether striving to conceive itself, its own spir- 
itual substance, objectively (God), or as a simple sub- 
ject (a particular man), it has ever reached most 
desperate conclusions, now totally blocking its way 
to the comprehension and justification of its own sub- 
jectivity, and now secluding itself in an abstract sub- 
jectivity, removed from all which man theoretically 
and practically needs in order to live. The reality 
of the spirit is not in the subject as opposed to the 
object, but in the subject that has in itself the object 
as its actuality. 

It is on account of this inseverable unity, by which 
the subject presses to itself the object and becomes 
actual therein, that the progressive alteration of the 



230 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

object is also the progressive alteration of the subject. 
At every given moment, the subject, altered as it is, 
made into the "other" or determined, is yet pure sub- 
ject, arid nothing else than the subject which becomes 
conscious of itself, and therefore actual by determining 
itself as subject of its object, in such a way that the 
subject as well as the object is always new and always 
different. Not because it is now one subject and now 
another, in which case succession and enumeration 
would import multiplicity, and would therefore reduce 
the spirit to a thing; but because it appears and can- 
not but appear thus, if observed from the point of view 
which distinguishes one individual from another, and in 
the same individual one instant from the next, al- 
though from a rigorously idealistic point of view the 
spirit is one, and its determinateness does not detract 
from its absolute originality. 

This dialectic in which the spiritual becoming un- 
folds itself (subject, object, and unity of subject and 
object), this self-objectifying or self-estrangement aim- 
ing at self -attainment, — this is the eternal life of the 
spirit, which creates its immortal forms, and deter- 
mines the ideal contents of culture and education. The 
spirit's self-realisation is the realisation of the subject, 
of the object, and of their relationship. If of these 
three terms (the third being the S)m thesis of the first 
and second) any one should fail, the spiritual reality 
would ce^e to be. 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION ^31 

This threefold realisation admits empirically of a 
separation that makes it possible to have one without 
the others. On the strength of this triple division 
we speak of art, of religion, and of philosophy, as 
though each one of them could subsist by itself. So 
that commonly people believe that it is possible to be a 
poet without in any way burdening one's mind with 
religion or philosophy, — especially philosophy, which 
appears to be the bugbear of most poets. In the same 
way many philosophers, and among them one of the 
very greatest, held art to be the negation of philosophy, 
to the point that it should be banished from the king- 
dom where the latter was expected to reign. And 
how often has religion taken up arms, now against 
poetry, and now against speculation! All of these 
occurrences were possible because the three terms were 
looked upon as separable, as though they were 
three material things, each one of which could be 
what it was only on condition that it excluded the 
others. 

A superficial understanding of the differences in- 
tervening between these three terms is the reason why 
they are often looked upon as separable. But in real- 
ity they are so indissolubly conjoined, that separation 
would destroy their spiritual character, and put in its 
place mechanism, which is the property of all that is 
not spirit. 

Art is the self-realisation of the spirit as subject. 



232 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

Man becomes enfolded in his subjectivity, and hears 
but the voice of iove or other inward summons. Liv- 
ing without communication with the world, he re- 
frains from affirming and denying what exists and what 
does not exist. He simply spreads out over his own 
abstract interior world, and dreams; and as he dreams, 
he escapes from the outer bustle into the seclusion of 
his enchanted realm, which is true in itself until he 
issues from it and discovers it to be a figment of his 
phantasy. This man is the artist, who, we might say, 
neither cognises nor acts, but sings. 

His subjectivity appears empirically to us always 
as a determined subjectivity, the determination of 
which proceeds from the object in which the spirit, 
theoretically and practically, has previously objecti- 
fied itself. But this priority of the act, by which the 
artist is considered a man of this objective world be- 
fore he withdraws into his dreams, is a mere empirical 
appearance. If we relied on it, we could not preserve 
to the spirit in its artistic life that originality and 
autonomy, that absolute spontaneity and freedom, 
which is the essential character or, as we called it, the 
attribute of spiritual activity. To become objective, 
the spirit must first be subject; and in front of the 
object in which it objectifies itself, it again inevitably 
becomes subject, — an ever determined one indeed, but 
nothing else than a subject. That is why the con- 
temporary theory of aesthetics holds that form in art 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 233 

absorbs in itself the content, with no residuum. It 
absorbs it qua subjectivity; for whatever the object 
be which this subjectivity, empirically considered, has 
enwrapped, it draws it entirely over to itself, reassumes 
it, and as pure subjectivity it cannot return to its object 
without passing through the moment of its opposition 
to the object, — the moment in which the subject is 
nothing else than subject, and finds in itself infinite 
gratification. This is the realm of art, a realm from 
which the spirit, in consequence of the very function of 
the subject, is compelled to issue; since the subject 
is subject in that it issues from itself, becomes self- 
conscious, objectifies itself. So the poet as he dreams 
breathes life into the personages of his dreams, builds 
them up, and gives them reality. What is his own ab- 
stract subjectivity he chooses as a world in which he 
himself may live absolutely; and the ideas which ma- 
ture in that fantastic world of his — which is nothing 
more, as I have said, than his abstract subjectivity — 
are affirmed by him without any reserves, and are op- 
posed to the ideas of philosophers and of men who 
prefer concrete reality to phantasy. 

This lyrical bent, peculiar to the artist who en- \ 
hances himself by exalting his own abstract individu- 
ality, is in direct contrast with the tendency of the 
Saint, who crushes and annihilates this same individu- 
ality in the face of his God, — that God who infinitely 
occupies his consciousness as the "other" in absolute 



234 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

alter ity to him, so that the subject is hurled into the 
object in a total self-abstraction. It sinks in the con- 
templation of its own self in its objective "otherness," 
of itself become the other, in which it no longer rec- 
ognises itself. So he deifies this other self, places 
it on the altar, and kneels before it. Thus the saint's 
personality is nulHfied; or rather, it is actualised and 
realised in this self-annulment, which is the theoretical 
and practical characteristic of mysticism and the spe- 
cific act of religion. 

It is not possible to tear art from the spirit's life, 
in as much as it could not be the synthesis it actually 
is without being subjectivity. It is equally impos- 
sible for the spirit to be completely devoid of relig- 
iosity. The mystic flower of faith grows out of the 
bosom of art, — a faith in an object which draws the soul 
to itself and conquers it. The life of the spirit is an 
eternal crossing from art to religion, from the subject 
to the object. It is impossible for the artist to realise 
his art in unalloyed purity, since his world, the world 
he has created for himself, is nevertheless the bigger 
world, out of which, empirically speaking, he is driven 
only by the needs of practical life, which awaken him 
and remind him of the existence of a wider world. In 
the same way it is impossible to realise a pure religion 
in which the subject completely and effectually might 
annihilate itself. For in the measure that faith in- 
creases in intensity, and the sentiment of one's own 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 235 

nothingness grows deeper, and the idea that the object 
is all becomes more obsessing, in that same measure the 
energy of the spirit increases, of the spirit as the sub- 
ject that has been powerful enough to create this situa- 
tion. Altars must be built in order that people may 
kneel in front of them. The concept of God, it, too, has 
a history. And from this history no word can be taken 
away on the assumption that it was immediately re- 
vealed. For there is no word which pre-exists as such 
before the act of him who cognises it. And to fix a 
dogma, that is, to rescue it from the flow of evolution, 
we should have to withdraw from the course of evolu- 
tion the men themselves who are to accept it. 

Nothing therefore is more impious than the history 
of religion, in the course of which man, now dragging 
his God down to the depths of his apparent misery, 
now lifting him to the heights of his real greatness, 
progresses from station to station along the unending 
way of sorrows and joys. The process of mental de- 
velopment shows unwittingly, by the very acts of man's 
innocent piety, that God is Ms God, that the life of the 
object is the same as the life of the subject. 

The nature then both of art and of religion implies 
a flagrant contradiction which comes to this, — that the 
subject to be subject is object, and the object to be 
object is subject. Hence the torments of the poet and 
the spasms of the mystic. A perfect art and a perfect 
religion, that is, art which is not religion, and religion 



236 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

which is not art, are two impossibilities. This does 
not mean that either art or religion can ever be super- 
seded and left behind as two illusions, ancient and 
constant, if we will, but none the less devoid of all 
value. The very contrary of this is true. Just be- 
cause there is no pure art, religion is eternal; and art 
is eternal, because religion cannot be attained in its 
absolute purity. 

The concrete spirit is neither subject nor object. It 
is a self-objectifying subject, and an object which 
becomes the subject in virtue of the subjectivity that 
alights on it as it realises it. The spirit is therefore 
a becoming. It is the synthesis, the unity of these 
two opposites, ever in conflict and yet always intimately 
joined. And the spirit, as this unity, is the concreteness 
both of art (reality of the abstract subject) and of 
religion (reality of the abstract object). It is philoso- 
phy. Many definitions have been given of philosophy, 
and all of them true, because directly or indirectly 
they may, on the strength of what is expressed or 
what is understood, be reduced to the following defini- 
tion: that philosophy is the spirit. If we say that it 
is the science of the spirit, we indulge in a useless 
pleonasm. For science, unless we distinguish in an 
absolute manner (which is impossible) one grade of 
determinateness from the other, is the same as con- 
sciousness; and spirit is, as we have seen, self -con- 
sciousness. If we say that philosophy is the science 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 237 

of reality in its universality, we lose sight of the fact 
that reality, for those who do not stray off into the 
maze of abstractness, is the spirit. A definition which 
has never lost its value is that one which makes 
philosophy consist in the elaboration of concepts, that 
is, in the unification of all the concepts (those we pos- 
sess, of course) into a coherent concept. This is an 
excellent definition, and it warns us that philosophy 
is not obtained by stopping before abstractions, no 
matter what these abstractions may be. All particu- 
lar things are abstractions, each one of which yields 
a concept, and all of them give a number of concepts, 
which must be brought together and unified, if we ever 
intend to think all things that are thought, and thus 
philosophise. The subject without the object as the 
artist wants it is an abstraction; and similarly abstract 
is the object which religion looks up to. 

We are accustomed, not without reason, to distin- 
guish the life of the spirit from philosophy. But the 
reason, instead of destroying, confirms the identity 
between spirit and philosophy, and for the following 
cause. The spirit never being what it ought to be, 
we live acquiring consciousness of ourselves. But when 
we pause to ask ourselves if we have really obtained 
this consciousness, and turn to our life as to the 
subject-matter of this problem, which is the problem 
of philosophy, we discover that we cannot answer in 
the affirmative. For answering is spiritual living, a 



/ 



238 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

living, therefore, which consists not in having self- 
consciousness but in acquiring it. So that philosophy 
does not arise from the need of understanding the life 
already lived, for the past is the realm of death; but 
rather from the much keener desire of living, of leading 
a better life, a true life, and of finally realising this 
spiritual reality which is our ideal. But when? 

Can we believe that there is ever going to be a 
philosophy which will definitely fulfil the ideal? It 
is obvious that a pursuit of such philosophy would 
lead the spirit into a race to death; whereas on the 
contrary the spirit is life; it is an impulse to ever more 
intense living. 

This philosophy, it is evident, is not the exclusive, 
esoteric classroom discipline, the professional privilege 
of a few specialists. It is rather the source from 
which this professional speculation derives its right 
to address all men who have an exalted sentiment of 
their human dignity, who hearken to the deeper utter- 
ances of their souls, who are able to see how much of 
their own self there is in this vast world which is being 
disclosed to their eyes; who, even though vaguely and 
timidly, are conscious of the divine power that resides 
in every human heart; who feel that this human heart, 
prone though it be to all baseness, is also capable of 
lifting itself to the most sublime heights, and of en- 
joying the pure and lofty satisfactions which human 
phantasy ordinarily relegates to heaven. In the depths 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 239 

of every mind there is a philosophy: the mind itself is 
untiring speculation, which more or less successfully 
scales the height, but which is always turned upward 
to the summit whitened by the rising sun. Life is 
made human by the rays of this philosophy. Man is 
really man when he recognises an object which is the 
world, reality, law, and when he recalls that nothing 
absolves him from the duty of being in this world; 
of seriously being in it, which means working and co- 
operating towards reality by knowing reality and ful- 
filling the law. For in his freedom and power he can 
never divest himself of his own responsibility; he must 
therefore develop his capacity to the utmost value, and 
to that end work and work, think, and act as the centre 
of his world. This philosophy does not allow him 
either to withdraw into the abstract retirement of his 
egoistic self, or to deny and sacrifice this self to an 
imaginary reality. This philosophy is never finished, 
never completed, for it is his own spirit, his very self, 
which to live must grow, and which must constitute 
itself as it develops. And therefore this philosophy 
cannot help being man's ideal, which is always being 
realised and which is never fulfilled. 

So, then, education, which aims at that concrete and 
truly real unity which is the life of the spirit, must 
always be moral, always spiritual, always philosophic. 
An invidious word, perhaps, for those who have had 
the misfortune to fall into the mean and vulgar habit 



240 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

of grinning and scoffing in retaliation for the unsparing 
censure inflicted by the ideal on sloth, presumption, 
and cowardice. We might perhaps replace this word 
by "integral," excepting that this adjective is generic 
and therefore inappropriate. 

I must add, however, that in speaking of philosophic 
education, I do not mean any special course . in phi- 
losophy. Though I believe that special philosophical 
training has an essential function in the curriculum of 
secondary schools which aim to prepare and direct 
towards higher studies a matured mentality, scien- 
tifically trained and humanly inspired, I yet hold that 
this special philosophical training can be effectual only 
if all education, from its very beginning, wherever that 
may be, has been philosophic. We must reflect that 
just as it is impossible for a man to be moral only at 
certain hours of the day, and in certain particular 
places, morality being the atmosphere without which 
the spirit cannot live, so that ethical teaching is dis- 
torted and deflected as soon as it is relegated to cer- 
tain definite books, to be studied in connection with 
certain definite courses; in the same way this philos- 
ophy which is for us the ideal content of education, 
and therefore its ideal, cannot but be present in every 
real educative act, cannot help reflecting itself in every 
throb it gives to the soul of the pupil. This general 
philosophic education naturally includes art and re- 
ligion, which cannot be limited subject-matters of spe- 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 241 

cial courses of instruction, co-ordinated or subordinated 
to the other elements of the curriculum. 

Only the particular sciences, that is, the sciences 
properly so called, may be freely moved in a student's 
schedule; they may be added or taken away, they may 
be grouped this or that way, and be variously dis- 
tributed in accordance with the needs of the moment 
and the particular exigencies of the student or of man 
in general. For these sciences reflect in themselves 
the fragmentary multiplicity of things which have been 
abstractly cut off from the centre of the spirit, to which 
however they too refer. And because they do refer 
to it, the teaching of them should be spiritualised, mor- 
alised, humanised; it ought to acquire the concreteness 
of philosophy, and therefore never ignore the exigen- 
cies of art and of religion. For otherwise it will be 
merely material instruction, ''informative education," 
which in reality is no education at all. 

During the Revival of Learning education was 
humanistic. Its ideal was art. The historical life 
which corresponded to this ideal was the individualism 
of our Itahan Renaissance. After the Counter Re- 
formation, art, which is individuality in abstract sub- 
jectivity, was abandoned to itself, and inevitably de- 
cayed in the cult of lifeless form; it became barren in 
the imitations of classical art considered as final perfec- 
tion, to which the individual might raise himself but 
beyond which he could not possibly proceed. Art 



242 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

became thus the negation of originality, and of that 
subjective autonomy of which it naturally should be 
the most enhancing expression. So that classicism up 
to the Romantic Revolt remained the cultural form 
of a society submissive to the principle of authority 
and religiously oriented. These conditions favoured 
the study of the science of nature, which to the extent 
that it is governed by the naturalistic principle is a 
manifestation of religiosity. The devotee of natural 
science speaks in fact of his Nature with an agnostic 
reverence similar to that professed by the saint in the 
worship of God. Nature, which alone he knows, 
becomes the object before which the subject, Man, 
disappears. But as science progresses, the need of 
shaking the principle of authority makes itself felt; 
the accepted truths of nature are subjected to criticism; 
the power of doubting is reintroduced, and the subject 
again reasserts itself. So the advancement of natural 
science has gradually turned humanity away from the 
shrines of naturalistic science. When naturalism op- 
posed the claims of religion, it ceased to be the science 
of nature, and became philosophy. This influenced the 
scientific spirit in its clash with religious dogmas, and 
restored to it the consciousness of the moment of sub- 
jectivity which had been forgotten. The ideal of cul- 
ture, which prevailed in the nineteenth century with the 
triumph of positivism, was science, naturalism, and 
therefore religion. It is now high time that the two 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 243 

opposed elements be joined and united, and that the 
school be neither abstractly humanistic in the pursuit 
of Art nor abstractly religious and scientific, but that it 
be made what it is ideally, and what it is also in prac- 
tice when it efficaciously educates — the philosophic 
school. 

As each one has a different path to follow in this 
world, edch one will accordingly have his own edu- 
cation. But all paths converge to one point, where 
we all gather to lead in common that universal life 
which alone makes us men. And as we meet at this 
centre, we must understand each other, and should 
be able therefore to speak the same language, the 
language of the spirit. We are compelled by an ir- 
resistible need to live this common life, and together to 
constitute one sole spirit. But this end we shall never 
attain if man, who ought to be entire and complete, 
acts as a mere fragment, — such fragment, for example, 
as the aesthete, or the superstitious worshipper, or the 
star gazer, always unaware of the pit under his feet. 
If we continue in this state, in which one man clings to 
the superstition of mathematics, another idolises en- 
tomology, a third worships physics, and so on in- 
definitely, if man insists on fencing off his little piece 
of this "thrashing-floor that makes us cruel," knowing 
no other man but himself, feeling no needs other than 
his own, then war will break out. Not a disciplined 



244 THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

war, governed by a law, by an idea, by reason, of 
which it is the life; but a war of every man against his 
brother, — the anarchistic uprising, the disintegration 
of the spirit, and the stern suffering which is true 
misery. 

The dislike for the purus mathematicus ^ is tradi- 
ditional. But whether he be a mathematician, or a 
priest, or an economist, or a dentist, or a poet, or a 
street cleaner, man as a fragment of humanity is a 
nuisance. 

We want mathematics, but we want it in the man. 
And the same for religion, economics, poetry, and all 
the rest. Otherwise we suffocate, and die stifled. For 
all these are things, but there is no life; and things op- 
press us and kill us. Therefore let us spiritualise 
things by reviving the spirit. Let us release it, that 
it may freely move in the organic unity of nature. Let 
us train it so that its strength, agility, balance, and 
all around development shall be able to control all its 
dependent functions, which can be successfully carried 
on only on condition that they agree, and collaborate 
toward common life. And this is what I call philosophy. 

Or we may call it humanity, if the word philosophy 
suggests strangeness and difficulty of attainment. For 
our demand for an educational reform, in accordance 
with our renewed consciousness, is prompted by the old 

1 Eeferring to the old phrase, purus mathematicus, purus 
asinus. 



THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION 245 

but never ancient desire which put the lantern in the 
hand of the Greek philosopher. Education is truly 
human when it has for its contents that ideal which I 
have briefly touched upon in this chapter, the ideal 
of the spirit, philosophy. 



CHAPTER XI 

CONCLUSION 

We may look upon the preceding chapters as a kind 
of general examination to which we submitted our 
consciences, by reflecting on the way we have always 
performed our duty as teachers, by considering our 
purposes, and by scrutinising the internal logic of our 
task. And our investigation has been eminently hu- 
man, since indeed man's essence, we have now come 
to understand, is to acquire self-consciousness. 

The patriotic character of the event which was the 
immediate cause of this work induced me to show that 
the common spirit which brought us together was not 
a mere political sentiment, of which we should rid our- 
selves in crossing the threshold of the school. For 
we could not but bring into the classroom our own 
humanity and our living personality, in which the con- 
tent of our teaching and of all education must live. 
This personality, however it may be considered, from 
whatever point of view it may be regarded, has no 
particular substance which is not also at the same time 
universal, — domestic as the case may be, or social, 
political, or whatever may be the phase in which it is 
determined in its historical development. And since, 

246 



CONCLUSION 247 

in this historical development of our universal per- 
sonality, there is Italy with her memories perpetuated 
by our immanent sentiment, by our immanent con- 
sciousness and by our immanent will, we could not 
possibly be ourselves were we not at the same time 
Italian educators. 

And looking attentively at this universal foundation 
on which our own human value is supported — call it 
language, logic, law, — we were led to study the rela- 
tionship existing between individuality, which is the 
aim of all forms of education, and this universal spirit 
which here intervenes as it does in every moment of 
the human life. It intervenes in education, as the 
science and the conscience and the entire personality 
of the teacher. This personality seems to be violently 
imposed upon the pupil in such a way as to check or 
hinder his spontaneous development; but we saw that 
the immediate logical opposition between teacher and 
learner gradually resolves itself into the unity of the 
spiritual process in which education becomes actual. 

Education therefore appeared to us, not as a fact 
which is empirically observable, and which may be 
fixed and looked upon as subject to natural laws, but 
rather as a mystical formation of a super-individual 
spirituality, which is the only real, concrete person- 
ality actualised by the individual. In order to under- 
stand it, we had to liberate it from every kind of con- 
tact with culture in its materialistic acceptance; and 



248 CONCLUSION 

we therefore insisted on the speculative inquiry into 
what we called the realistic point of view. We en- 
deavoured to explain how and why culture is the very 
process of education, and the very process of the per- 
sonality in which education takes place. This con- 
ception would have lacked the necessary support, had 
we not carried our investigation further, and shown 
that this culture in which the spirit unfolds itself is not 
the attribute of a mind existing amidst other minds 
and face to face with surrounding nature, but is instead 
the most genuine signification of All. For it is the 
life of the spirit in which everything gathers to find its 
support and become thinkable. Man, as he is edu- 
cated, is man rigorously considered as spirit, — spirit 
which is free, because infinite and truly universal in 
every one of its moments and attitudes. This the edu- 
cator must intently consider if he wants to conceive 
adequately his task and its enormous responsibilities, 
which become evident when he reflects how in the 
monad of the individual, in the simple soul of the child 
entrusted to his creative care, the infinite vibrates, and 
a life is born at every instant, which thence throbs over 
the boundless expanse of space, of time, and of all 
reality. 

This adequate conception need not be elaborated 
into a complete system of philosophy. The educator 
must sense and grasp this infinite over which every 
word of his is carried, every glance of his, every ges- 



CONCLUSION 249 

ture. As he enters the classroom, as he approaches 
the child, to whom not only magna reverentia is due, 
but the very cult which is shown to things divine, he 
cannot but feel himself exalted; he cannot but be 
fully conscious of the difficulties of his lofty station, 
and of the duty of overcoming them. He must there- 
fore dismiss from within himself all that is petty in his 
particular personality, all his preoccupations and pas- 
sions, all his commonplace everyday thoughts. He 
must shake off the depressing burden of the flesh, which 
pulls him downward; and he will then open his soul 
to fortifying Faith, to the ruling and inspiring Deity. 
The man who is not capable of feeling in the School the 
sanctity of the place and of his work is not fit to be 
an educator. 

The spirituality of education becomes however an 
empty formula, and a motif for rhetorical variations, 
if on the one hand we do not possess the concept of the 
essence or of the attributes of the spirit, and if on the 
other we do not sharply expose those realistic preju- 
dices of pedagogy which have been maintained in the 
field of education by the materialistic conception of 
man and by a tradition which is both unreflecting and 
alien to all radical criticism. I tried to satisfy both 
these exigencies rather by arousing the reflection and 
impelling it on its way than by escorting it on a jour- 
ney which must be undertaken with due preparation. 

And finally, in the effort to provide ourselves with 



250 CONCLUSION 

a motto, so to speak, and a rallying banner, I set forth 
the doctrine of educational unity — of the education 
which is always at all moments education of the spirit. 
For even physical culture is conceivable only as forma- 
tion of the mind, and more properly of character. 
Education, we saw, may be made actual in a thousand 
different ways, only always on condition that we ob- 
serve the law which proceeds from its innermost es- 
sence and constitutes its immanent ideal. Every 
education is good, provided it is education — phi- 
losophical, human, mind-stirring education; provided 
it does not bring atrophy to any necessary function 
of the spirit, does not crush the spirit under 
the weight either of things or of the divinity, nor 
excessively exalt it in the consciousness of its own 
personal power; provided it neither hurls it into the 
free abstract world of dreams nor fetters it in the iron 
chains of an inhuman reality; and provided it does not 
shatter it and scatter its fragments by the multiple 
investigations of things innumerable, the knowledge 
of which can never bring satisfaction. For it is the 
function of education to enable the centralising unity 
of the reflective spirit to become articulate and varied 
through the multiplicity of life and of experience, which 
is the actuality of the spirit itself. Opposition to all 
abstractions, in behalf of the concrete spirit and of 
liberty — that is our educational ideal. 



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